Diminishing Returns
Sean Moore
Nobody listens any more. I can’t talk to the walls because they’re yelling at me. I can’t talk to my wife; she listens to the walls.
What benefit do you receive when a new user signs up for Facebook, or Twitter, or any of these social networking platforms? What benefit, in fact, do you receive when you make a new friend, or a new follower?
Let’s enumerate the obvious, lest someone later call me deliberately obscure. To be sure, every new add to the network is an additional revenue source – another eyeball to plaster with advertisements, promotions, sponsored content, and bullshit social graph promotion (why yes, I would like to know how many friends ‘liked’ KFC). More revenue, more growth, means the shooting star of a start-up can exist longer, can afford a new feature, can spend time and attention making what you use lovelier.
And make no mistake, there is a certain kind of benefit when you add a person to your own personal social graph. Another set of life’s snippets, momentarily plastering the backs of your eyeballs before being lost in the avalanche of the news feed. Another person who will guffaw at your dick jokes. Or an ever increasing supply of the boring lunches of boring people, dressed in a slap-dash filter. There’s value to content, to be sure.
Hooray! Every new user means your social network can continue to supply you with a set of features to keep track of the exciting activities of all your friends.
Long live the king.
Is there a true value to adding another user, or another friend? Is there any practical difference between your graph having ten friends, or a hundred, or a thousand?
A social network – and truly, any sort of network – should be judged by how much value is imparted to the current users of the network when an additional user is added. A simple metric, really. Do additional users add any meaningful utility to the current system?
There’s obviously diminishing returns here. Adding to a network of one is an extremely valuable operation – it’s what makes language and writing so inherently valuable. It’s unfair in many ways to compare that to adding another person in a billion-strong network.
What’s concerning though is that these additional users in these high-capacity networks are diminishing the value for existing users. Maybe they use the product differently than the people that were already there – if that usage is happening at a large scale, it could spell doom for the current users. Goodbye, thing you love. Hello, thing you love to rant about.
Remember the Mayflower coming to America? It’s like that, but with no Thanksgiving.
There’s no set in stone rule that these network-effect products have to produce devaluation when such a large scale is reached. It’s merely a consequence of poor product design. Networks need to be designed to constantly add value when new users, and whatever they happen to bring with them, are added. The product’s long-term success depends on it.