Yesterday I read the excellent article by Cory Doctorow: Let the Platforms Burn and this particular anecdote The thing is, network effects are a double-edged sword. People join a service to be with the people they care about. But when the people they care about start to leave, everyone rushes for the exits. Here’s danah [...]
There’s a link to the full thing. It should have more context
Not really. There is some discussion of “emotionally sticky nodes”, but they aren’t really defined, just described. Which is fine, and it’s actually an interesting article, but when you start throwing around terms like “nodes” it makes it sound like you want your readers to think you’re talking about something that is empirically valid, not just giving your opinion.
The word “nodes” in this context is referring to something empirically valid. “Node” is used in academic studies on social media, and it is not difficult to form an objective, quantitative definition of “node” when you are talking about a platform where relationships are defined by “following “ or “subscribing.” You can pick any metric or combination of metrics built into the platform, and create a definition that will give reproducible results for a study in a quantitative field. Social media researchers also use easily reproducible analyses to define emotional engagement, although “emotionally sticky“ appears to be a variation on the equally common research term “stickiness,” since I didn’t immediately find academic sources for the exact phrase.
Doctorow only brushes over the concept in passing, so I can see why it wouldn’t look intellectually rigorous, but it simply is not true that “emotionally sticky nodes” are purely a matter of opinion. A matter for discussion, yes, and you could rectally generate your list of “emotionally sticky nodes,” but this is also exactly the kind of term someone would use in an academic paper on the topic of how social media platforms succeed or fail.