The Stellar Theory of Social Media Evolution

Copyright 2024 Kurt Cagle / The Cagle Report

Several years ago, I wrote a piece about my theory of social media evolution. It has disappeared deep into the recesses of the Internet, and given the change in landscape, it was probably a good time to revive it. This is important for several reasons, not least because I think that Generative AI will become the shape of the following social media fabric for all its warts and issues.

Social Media has been around for a long time, long enough to evolve a definite pattern of curious behaviours, like a star's evolution as it goes through its life cycle. While the metaphor could be clearer, it is still a good benchmark for understanding what is happening with the various behemoths dominating this space.

Stage 1. Ripples In Space

Stars generally do not spontaneously form in galaxies, except very early on, in the very earliest stages, where there are a lot of free Hydrogen molecules and not much else. This dynamic is sufficiently different that I'll keep it as an edge case and explore it later.

No, for the most part, stars form when something else blows up. A large gas giant goes supernova and collapses into a black hole or neutron star, creating ripples of gravity waves that move through the galaxy. These waves concentrate matter into bands and regions and seed heavier elements into the interstellar medium.

In the social media world, this is usually the collapse of another social media company. For instance, Compuserve, way back in the day, evolved from some of the earliest bulletin board systems that had sprung up in the distribution of modems to personal computing, in effect creating a closed garden network. Compuserve was the LinkedIn of its day, primarily a business social media system that nonetheless attracted a lot of early techies. Compuserve would eventually be acquired by H&R Block and, in many respects, set the template for private social media companies.

Not surprisingly, social media is built around people, most looking to network with others. These companies are initially oriented towards providing services to people to get them to homestead there, often because an existing service was not broad enough or no longer provided value to the people who made up the most active users. This is a Stage 1 Social Media Company. Often these nascent companies are rough around the edges, and many fall apart before they hit a critical mass, either because they can't attract people or because they end up merging with other companies.

Stage 2. Ignition

The next stage of stellar evolution is ignition when the star reaches critical mass to initiate fusion. This is usually controlled by factors such as the available gas composition and the degree of rotation around a common centre that was likely set off by the gravity waves. A central bulge forms (or, in many cases, two countervailing bulges as vortex patterns, creating binary stars).

One sufficient pressure is met, the Hydrogen begins to fuse into Helium. Eventually, the energy from this fusion makes its way to the outer peripheries of the nascent star, and a stream of particles creates a stellar wind, turning the star into a huge magnet. This clears out much of the extraneous hydrogen from above the centre of rotation, accelerating the growth. This stage of stellar evolution occurs fairly quickly, usually over a few million years, and the star continues to grow even as irregularities in the rotation induce rings around the star.

The second stage, analogue to stellar ignition, is the formal establishment of the company as a viable concern. This creates the second tier of founder users of the service, many of whom begin to position themselves as critical people within the organization. Growth during this period is comparatively slow because the services don't benefit most people. Still, the people attracted at this stage are usually very technically inclined and become the next layer of influencers (many end up becoming early investors or employees).

Stage 3. Planet Formation and Dramatic Growth

The move from an incandescent neo-star to a stable star system is a slow-motion demolition derby. The star becomes large enough to create a ring system, with vortices then forming into planets (assuming they don't get too close too the sun, at which point the Roche limit may tear them apart), the star itself gets hotter and brighter, and the various larger planets move around in reaction to being in an n-body problem (the more massive the star, the more the planets stabilize into long term orbits (or get ejected out of the stellar system altogether). The sun is in the late stages of this process, with another 2-4 billion years where hydrogen remains the primary fuel of the star.

The social media equivalent is a period where growth becomes what appears to be exponential, though, in fact, it is on the high growth side of a logistics curve. This is the most exciting phase of the social media company, in which the users coming into the system see regular updates that increase the value of participation for users, making the site stickier.

Stage 4. Phase Transition

At a certain point, deep within the star, the by-products of the hydrogen fusion process - helium, mainly, but also heavier elements, migrate to the centre. When the pressure becomes large enough, Helium fuses to heavier elements, notably Carbon. This takes a larger activation energy and returns less energy in the process. The star starts to expand as the core compresses until, over time, the star begins to balloon into its giant phase. The Sun will go through this process about 2 1/2 billion years from now, reaching a point where it expands nearly (or perhaps beyond) Earth's orbit, consuming most of the inner planets.

The social media analogy comes with the growing demands for money - for infrastructure, salaries, and paying increasingly impatient investors. The social media company is no longer making enough money from its (now slowing) user base to justify the costs, and the company's focus has shifted away from providing value to the users to providing incentives to businesses. Because of this focus on profit, the quality of user interaction begins to drop as expectations are no longer met, and the company does everything it can to make it harder for people to leave the service while quality begins to suffer. This is also the phase where the company buys companies to stave off the transition to stage 5, usually without much success.

[Edit] Stage 4 is also when you are most likely to see upstart competitors prove most successful in "stealing" users away from established social media companies. MySpace was one of the most dominant social media companies several years ago, though it was beginning to show signs of slipping into Stage 4. Rupert Murdoch's acquisition of the site, however, caused a massive migration to the nascent Facebook platform, to the extent that MySpace effectively collapsed overnight. A similar phenomenon can be seen with Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter, though this was tempered by the fact that there were comparatively few venues close enough for people to migrate to (although it did launch Mastodon into the stratosphere briefly). A lack of an alternative platform can cause Stage 4 to drag out.

Stage 5. Implosion

The star does not stay in Stage 4 all that long. More heavier elements are produced in concentric rings in the core via fusion, but eventually, the star reaches the production of iron. Iron is critical because it takes more energy to fuse iron into heavier products than the resulting fusion reaction produces. This causes the star to collapse dramatically in an implosion, with the outer layers blown off as a nova. Depending upon the size of the initial star, this phase can end up pushing significant amounts of the star several light years out. A degenerate star remains - a white dwarf, a neutron star, a quark star, or, if the star is massive enough, a black hole.

From the social media side, this is the period when the social media company is overwhelmed by bots (a process called zombification) to the extent that bots make up a significant percentage of all accounts on the site. Advertisers usually begin leaving around this point, and investors begin selling in earnest, hoping to get enough back to avoid being stuck with the rising bills.

Stage 6. Degeneracy

A star's end of life depends upon its initial size. A great number of stars are red dwarfs. Because they "burn" fairly cool, they can last for as much as 50 billion years, slowly growing dimmer and dimmer until they eventually become a black dwarf, essentially a very dense diamond made of carbon that is barely warmer than the surrounding space. An M-series star like the sun becomes a small red giant, eventually becoming a white dwarf, which is more compact but still degenerate. Above 2 solar masses, stars become neutron stars, in which the nuclei of atoms become an extraordinarily dense soup of neutrons held apart by degenerate pressure. At the upper end of this, the neutrons themselves decompose into quarks (a hypothetical state that creates a hyperdense core with an extreme magnetic field, though much beyond this point, the material becomes so dense that it collapses into a black hole, in which gravity is stronger than light. Compared to typical baryonic stars, there are relatively few black holes or other degenerate matter stars. By 100 billion years, however (about 10 times the current age of the universe), the bulk of the matter in the universe will be degenerate, mostly in the form of black holes.

Social media companies that enter degenerate states are usually bought up by holding companies and dismembered for assets or absorbed by another stage 3 or 4 company. Late-stage investors usually lose their shirts, most of the employees have left, and the company becomes something of a cautionary tale. The debt eventually gets written off as unrecoverable, usually during a recession.

Conclusion

I won't name names here. We're still fairly early in the modern computer era if you look at that period starting in the mid-1980s, meaning that we only have about 40 years of anecdotal history to go on, but the lifespan of a social media company is likely around 30 years. I could make the argument that the rise of AI is an indication that the major players today are now well within Stage 4 of the social media cycle, where bots are increasingly replacing life users in the system, and that rather than seeing the beginning of a new era, we may be seeing the end of an old one.

Now, I'll be the first person to say that this metaphor is leaky as hell, but it seems to model the growth, peak, and decline of all too many social media companies closely enough that I don't think I'm that far off.

In Media Res,

Kurt Cagle

Editor, The Cagle Report

Want to talk? Reach out to my Calendly account at https://calendly.com/theCagleReport.