Why Do Social Media Apps Lose Popularity?
We all remember Social Media sites that are not popular or may not even exist anymore — Ping, Google+, MySpace… why did these once popular apps lose their user base? The answer lies in the fact that there is not a substantial enough direct benefit for people to transition from using the most popular social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.) to using the less popular websites. This is partially due to the fact that using multiple websites at once is more work and people like to minimize the amount of work that they have to do. Usually, the popular websites have enough functionality that other websites have to either come up with new functions or try to best the popular websites in their current functions. However, the more people use the popular websites, the more bugs the website is able to fix; the more popular it gets, the smaller the margin gets between the website’s level of functionality and ‘perfection’. Essentially, if a new website wants to establish itself as a new social media powerhouse, it truly needs to have an idea that another website hasn’t had before, and this is getting more and more challenging as the popular websites are gaining more and more users and more and more credibility.
The article continues on a new path — a once-popular website may become old and irrelevant once the website is no longer “being responsive to the changing landscape and maturing of the social media landscape” (Academia). This was the case with MySpace when Facebook came along, and the article postulates that, someday, another social media site offering a new and improved technology may come dethrone Facebook or one of the other social media giants.