This is really interesting to watch, I hope there are some academics out there charting out the facts of the rise and fall of social networks for the rest of us to follow along, there are so many interesting things happening in the US big tech world.

I think people overestimate how quickly competition happens and underestimate how powerful it is. There is a massive hole for new competitors to move in to the social media space. I see Brett Weinstein has finally decided YouTube is untenable, for example. This is just another data point in a trend of people with interesting opinions rediscovering the dangers of centralisation.

I single out this quote from early in the article:

> For the past few years, we at Damn Interesting have been hearing from scores of long-time fans who were under the mistaken impression that we had ceased all operations years ago.

What this says to me is it takes people a few years to notice when a social network is no longer providing value. That sits well with my assumption that users actually leaving a platform is a long lagging indicator that the platform is dead. The early sign is that the content producers are being squeezed.