I graduated HS in '02, and everyone that went to college (.edu email address) was eventually on Facebook, everyone else was on MySpace. That (huge) demographic difference coupled with the poor and unpredictable interface for MySpace signaled their fate a long time ago in my opinion. This paper from a couple of years ago tackles the issue of class division between the two: http://bit.ly/classdivisions
MySpace now a “digital ghetto”
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Re: MySpace now a “digital ghetto”
#12[deleted]
Re: MySpace now a “digital ghetto”
#13Utter nonsense. Overlaying a racist agenda onto the shift from Myspace to Facebook is ridiculous. Neither have any barier to entry. Abandoning Yahoo! for Google might also shadow the population changes the author alludes to, but does that make google users racist? No. EDIT: the new original link provides more reasoned context - but even then, the data appears very, very weak [~4 anecdotal data points, all 17-year-old…
i think you misunderstand homophilia. ok, voted down, maybe for not explaining. alli can bring myself to do is say: the point is not barrier to entry but self-segregation. starting a comment with "Utter nonsense. is rediculous" is entertaining but poor form (in my books). i think there are real issues here that are being belittled simply because sociology and media studies do not fall into the IT/web realm you are co…
We're not all tech people here on HN. Could you expand on why you think homophillia is the presiding effect for the migration to Facebook?
Re: MySpace now a “digital ghetto”
#14I've always suspected Facebook was run by fascist white supremacists. How come you're not allowed to change your background colour from the prescribed white?!
Seriously though, nobody leaves a social networking site because "it's overcrowded with blacks". You wouldn't even leave such a site if it was overcrowded with trolls and racists. It's not a forum or some shared community resource - you only ever interact with your friends, and there's no such thing as overcrowding (as long as the servers keep up). The fail is strong in this report.
Re: MySpace now a “digital ghetto”
#15Utter nonsense. Overlaying a racist agenda onto the shift from Myspace to Facebook is ridiculous. Neither have any barier to entry. Abandoning Yahoo! for Google might also shadow the population changes the author alludes to, but does that make google users racist? No. EDIT: the new original link provides more reasoned context - but even then, the data appears very, very weak [~4 anecdotal data points, all 17-year-old…
First, read the actual article, not this poorly regurgitated bullshit (http://www.danah.org/papers/talks/PDF2009.html). Second, recognize the fact that Danah Boyd does actual research and generally knows her shit. Third, understand that she specifically says that we wouldn't expect to see the problem because there's no barrier to entry, yet we do anyways, which makes it that much more disturbing.
Re: MySpace now a “digital ghetto”
#16I graduated HS in '02, and everyone that went to college (.edu email address) was eventually on Facebook, everyone else was on MySpace. That (huge) demographic difference coupled with the poor and unpredictable interface for MySpace signaled their fate a long time ago in my opinion. This paper from a couple of years ago tackles the issue of class division between the two: http://bit.ly/classdivisions
I agree; facebook at first had to have similar differences being a 'college' only community - but since it has opened up I bet it has came back to a similar balance to any other site.
Re: MySpace now a “digital ghetto”
#17Utter nonsense. Overlaying a racist agenda onto the shift from Myspace to Facebook is ridiculous. Neither have any barier to entry. Abandoning Yahoo! for Google might also shadow the population changes the author alludes to, but does that make google users racist? No. EDIT: the new original link provides more reasoned context - but even then, the data appears very, very weak [~4 anecdotal data points, all 17-year-old…
i think you misunderstand homophilia. ok, voted down, maybe for not explaining. alli can bring myself to do is say: the point is not barrier to entry but self-segregation. starting a comment with "Utter nonsense. is rediculous" is entertaining but poor form (in my books). i think there are real issues here that are being belittled simply because sociology and media studies do not fall into the IT/web realm you are co…
I think that you actually have a point. It's not so much about racial than about social class divide.
The fact that there's a correlation between class and race in the US and in Europe is a leftover of our recent history.
Facebook is cleaner, more orderly. Myspace is more chaotic and flashy. It's not surprising that people will cling online to sites with some familiarity to their real life environment.
Re: MySpace now a “digital ghetto”
#18I'm old enough to remember white flight. To make an analogy with MySpace migration to Facebook is absurd.
Why? The only difference was that white flight had a quantifiable cost barrier preventing minorities from leaving decaying inner cities as well. She's saying that this is disturbing because it's still happening, even without that financial barrier.
Re: MySpace now a “digital ghetto”
#19That's an argument that's in a way true, but it's also a non-sequitir comparison: in order to live in a middle class suburb (or especially a middle/upper class section of an urban area, e.g. Pacific Heights in San Francisco) there's a very high monetary barrier to entry. There's no monetary barrier to entry for Facebook (especially since it's no longer just for college students-- which may have been the seedling of t…
Which is why it's that much more disturbing that the separation is taking place anyways.
Re: MySpace now a “digital ghetto”
#20Isn't the reason behind this obvious?
Facebook started out by targeting the Ivy League. Who is more likely to be upper-class and white than those whose social roots are at Harvard University? The restricted registration of Facebook, coupled with the importance of the network effect (making the site valuable only if you are already friends with educated Ivy League students) clearly dictates the direction of the site's demography as it grows.