Life Cycle of (Any Website/App That Used to Be Cool)
A new site pops up.
The site gets noticed by teens because it’s wide open and freeform and they can use it however they want and talk to each other without the adults around. They start to flock there.
They produce art, and music, and conversation, and weird things. Other artists and musicians hear about it and they show up, too.
Some people even start to make money from the site in personal, homemade ways.
Site becomes awesome.
Review sites start to notice how awesome it is and they write about it. People tell their friends about it. It gets even more popular, the hottest new thing. It becomes part of popular culture.
Marketers descend on it. Companies start buying ads to shove their products and services in front of the people they want to buy them. Some users discover how to game the site to get more attention or make more money.
The site’s creators make changes to the site to keep it fresh. Many of the users hate the changes. Before long everyone accepts them, but the early users have lost a bit of trust.
The site’s creators make more changes to encourage (or force) users to spend more time on the site so they’ll see more ads. Users really hate this. They start to complain.
Groups of people find each other on the site, to mutually support each other and share ideas. This is often great, because people with niche or marginalized interests need community. It is also often horrible, because people who want to watch the world burn find support and community, too.
The site may get big enough to get noticed by a huge company, which will buy it while swearing to never make any changes to this funky little site everyone likes. They will then wait a measured amount of time before making changes to control how the site can be used, with algorithms so that ads and marketing always gets priority. Users are not consulted in the decisions about how users will have to use the site.
Users making money find that they can’t get to as many customers anymore because the algorithms strangle them. Of course, they can pay to boost that reach…
Things on the site break, or just don’t work as well as they used to. Complaints get ignored, or guided to unhelpful help pages.
The horrible people find that just a few of them can cause a great deal of outsized havoc. The site may make an attempt to control this, or it may not.
The site begins to stagnate. It is no longer a site the grows organically from its users’ input, it is now a marketing machine where users are the product. Many users feel trapped because they’ve put so much work and time and care into their presence on the site, and all their friends are there. So they complain about it and talk about how great it used to be and they still use it but the joy is gone.
A new site pops up.
The site gets noticed by teens because it’s wide open and freeform and they can use it however they want and talk to each other without the adults around. They start to flock there.
Repeat.
