The natural cycles of scaled social networks

Network effects, overpopulation, and the Internet as ecosystem

Photo by Becca Tapert on Unsplash

In early 2008, I started a social network. It wasn’t very hard. I was able to do it in a few hours of my spare time. Granted, it lacked the scale of what Mark Zuckerberg was doing at Facebook. That was intentional, because it also ran on my values, rather than Zuck’s. But scale turned out to be the key to the fast rise and fall of my social network—and, potentially, of Zuck’s today.

In 2007–08, social networking was a vast, undiscovered frontier. Nobody knew how it would play out. For example, Chris Anderson, the influential author of a book on Internet dynamics called The Long Tail, wrote a blog post titled “Social Networking is a feature, not a destination.” In this post, Anderson defined social networking as “the tracking of individual preferences and behavior” in ways that empowered users to draw on their connections to each other, rather than simply receiving or reacting to content.

In other words, when a social network’s algorithms understood me, they could help me enrich my connections with people. Rather than a one-to-many broadcast medium, the Internet could become many-to-many: the world interacts with itself, and in the process creates value. Anderson thought these features should be part of every website, not just standalone sites such as Facebook or MySpace. “I think that one-size-fits-all will fail in social networking, just as it has everywhere else,” he said.

The powerful venture capitalist Marc Andreesen agreed. He funded a startup called Ning.com to provide a software platform on which anyone could start a social network. Chris Anderson called Ning “the long tail of social networks”: You could have a site for, say, Filipino musicians living in Chicago (there were 350 of them!). The musicians themselves would create the content; the platform would make money from ads. Ning offered a starter kit free for individuals to play around with, in hopes they might power the future.

My then-wife had just sold her stake in a newspaper/magazine for our small town. She was burned out, mostly from ad sales. But printing costs had been her biggest expense. She knew that her audience loved the content. Could we eliminate printing costs as our audience moved online, meanwhile taking advantage of these new social networking features to get audiences to participate more in content creation? I played around with Ning to find out.

The network grew quickly, for a small town. People joined to share their digital pictures, or publicize an upcoming event, or just because of a collective sense that being here was a form of being in community. Fun!

But participation soon withered. As one potential power-user complained, What was there to do here? On Facebook, you could use a mobile app. On Facebook, you could alter what you saw in your feed. On Facebook (by 2009), you could play Farmville—although don’t ask me why people wanted to play Farmville. On Facebook, you could network with not only your local community, but also your high school community, work community, and sports or arts or hobbyist communities. You could try to stitch these communities together, or try to keep them apart (aack, don't let Mom see that photo!). Facebook had lots to do, because it had scale.

On my site, decreased participation meant less new content, which meant less reason to show up. It soon entered a death spiral. These were classic network effects: a network is only popular when lots of other people participated. If I’d been more motivated, I might have scrambled for options. But it was 2008: the ad-based economy was imploding, entrepreneurs couldn’t get health insurance, and our household’s champion ad-seller was still burned out. After six months or so, I mothballed the site and devoted more of my spare time to Facebook.

If scale made Facebook in the 2000s, scale is unmaking it today. First came its evolution from a social networking site to a social media site. In order to continue to grow ad revenues and the time that I spend on the site, it increasingly offers me memes and videos that its algorithm thinks I will like, regardless of their source. In other words, I’m receiving and reacting to broadcast content more than building on connections with other users. But Zuck must feel that he has no choice, because he needs growth and is already maxed out on scale.

Now comes Zuck’s kowtowing to the Trump administration. Scale demands that he follow the populace. Scale makes him vulnerable to Trump’s potential whims. But many of my friends, infuriated, are departing for BlueSky or other greener pastures. As participation withers, I feel my corner of Facebook entering a death spiral.

I’m on BlueSky and Threads and Substack Notes (let’s connect!), but I have to admit that I haven’t yet gotten much value out of them. I’m mourning the loss of scale. I miss my old network. The algorithms feel like echo chambers of the small-scale communities that social networking had once helped me transcend. Facebook has shown the drawbacks of scale, but without scale the whole dream now feels impossible.

I share this story here because it feels like a natural story, one of human nature. One also of nature nature. What is the right scale of an ecosystem, or any participant in it? Some of America’s early ecologists were studying irruptions: when populations of deer or elk exploded, overwhelming the food sources available to them, and stayed at an unsustainably high scale for a surprisingly long time… until a sudden crash. Post-crash, it can take an ecosystem ages to recover.

What if social networking was an irruption? What if we told more natural stories about it?

Discussion:

• The Alaska writer Thomas Pease, one of my oldest and dearest friends and an early supporter of Natural Stories, now has his own website at

  https://thomaspease.com/. No social networking features (by design!), but plenty of links to great free content. :)