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Did Whites Flee the 'Digital Ghetto' of MySpace?

technologyreview.com

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Re: Did Whites Flee the 'Digital Ghetto' of MySpace?

#11
post #8
post #3

Don't conflate class divisions with racism. Whites did not flee the 'digital ghetto' of Myspace. College-educated young adults fled the 'digital ghetto' of Myspace.

As whites and asians disproportionally make up the college body in the US it's quite possible these two are the same.

Grammatically, "disproportionately" would have been a better choice for your utterly ridiculous statement.

Re: Did Whites Flee the 'Digital Ghetto' of MySpace?

#13
I don't know, but I've been describing twitter as a 'digital ghetto' for months now.

If they don't put a stop to the spammers, and build some better tools to filter users they're gonna get MySpaced in a big way.

EDIT This stunning bit of prose just came across my feed: "LOL NIGGAS IS SO FUNNY .... FUCK IT !"

I don't want to see this, anymore than they want to see me talk about agile software development.

Re: Did Whites Flee the 'Digital Ghetto' of MySpace?

#14
The article makes a big, big mistake. The same proportion of black people left myspace, but if you are white on facebook, and your friends are mostly white, then facebook looks like a white place. Same with blacks - if you are black and your friends are mostly black on facebook, it looks like a black place.

Myspace looks "ghetto" simply because there are more minority bands, and so more minorities still maintain active facebook profiles.

Re: Did Whites Flee the 'Digital Ghetto' of MySpace?

#15

I don't know, but I've been describing twitter as a 'digital ghetto' for months now. If they don't put a stop to the spammers, and build some better tools to filter users they're gonna get MySpaced in a big way. EDIT This stunning bit of prose just came across my feed: "LOL NIGGAS IS SO FUNNY .... FUCK IT !" I don't want to see this, anymore than they want to see me talk about agile software development.

Why did you follow that person?

Re: Did Whites Flee the 'Digital Ghetto' of MySpace?

#17

could it just be that MySpace gave its users too much freedom in page design and it turned into an ugly, blinking, unreadable, music auto-playing pile of s#it? And then people left?

Maybe. Aesthetic tastes differ, and the paper does provide some anecdotes suggesting that MySpace's profiles appealed more to certain racial and socioeconomic groups.

However, social networks do a pretty good job at segregating - as long as your friends are bourgeois and share your bourgeois design sensibilities, you can use MySpace without bumping into too much 'profile bling'.

Instead, it seems that some white and Asian kids of high socioeconomic status joined Facebook because it was associated with elite universities and therefore reflected their aspirations - and once this process started, people went where their friends were, self-segregating along racial and economic lines just like they do in high school (and throughout the rest of society.) Aesthetic tastes became a socially-acceptable justification for that move, but I don't think they were the primary cause.

That said, a good knowledge of the aesthetic preferences of various social groups could be valuable. Could a startup trigger a similar 'white flight' in an established service by intentionally appealing to the most economically valuable demographic? Can we build good niche businesses by creating things like race-specific Twitter clients?

Re: Did Whites Flee the 'Digital Ghetto' of MySpace?

#18

I don't know, but I've been describing twitter as a 'digital ghetto' for months now. If they don't put a stop to the spammers, and build some better tools to filter users they're gonna get MySpaced in a big way. EDIT This stunning bit of prose just came across my feed: "LOL NIGGAS IS SO FUNNY .... FUCK IT !" I don't want to see this, anymore than they want to see me talk about agile software development.

Why did you follow that person?

You don't need to follow someone to get that stuff.

I have a pretty short twitter name and get @ed with garbage messages by random people.

Re: Did Whites Flee the 'Digital Ghetto' of MySpace?

#19
I loved MySpace originally, then I left MySpace.

1) Craptastic, browser-clogging pages 2) Audio player that kept changing and getting worse 3) Mail full of VOTE FOR ME!!!!!1111 spam 4) Everyone basically begging you to frikkin BUY something of theirs 5) The Walled Garden: Hellish trying to link back to it

There was no direction, no sense that anyone was in charge. This is the second online catastrophe for Murdoch. He has the Kiss of Death for digital.

EDIT: And during my time there, there was never a racial component to anything. It's really a tragedy too. There was music there I never found as easily anywhere else.

Re: Did Whites Flee the 'Digital Ghetto' of MySpace?

#20

I don't know, but I've been describing twitter as a 'digital ghetto' for months now. If they don't put a stop to the spammers, and build some better tools to filter users they're gonna get MySpaced in a big way. EDIT This stunning bit of prose just came across my feed: "LOL NIGGAS IS SO FUNNY .... FUCK IT !" I don't want to see this, anymore than they want to see me talk about agile software development.

Why did you follow that person?

I followed them back after they followed me, so in a way it's my fault... In another it isn't. The whole follow me, and I'll follow you thing is effective from a marketing point of view, which is why the place is filled with useless affiliate spam.

They could stop allowing that sort of behavior, but they know that a large part of their user-base consists of 'self marketers' and other less subtle spam.

Why can't I sort or filter any of my incoming tweets in any meaningful way? I can have favorites. I can make lists. I CAN'T just type in 'Fck', and stop my feed from showing me the tweets with the word 'Fck' in them.

I can search for tweets about 'Ruby On Rails', but I can't just add those people to a list called 'Ruby On Rails' without clicking each one of them... Several times.

To top it off their API is so limited that just retrieving a list of the people I'm following means I get blocked for an hour before I can do anything with it, and bypassing their silly API is against the TOS. So writing my own tool to filter properly is straight out.

I wanted to write a simple naive Bayesian filter app to separate the wheat from the chaff for me, but they make it damned near impossible to do so without being sued.

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