CEO TwitterTism

It seems a current trend among social media services as of late is a nearly constant updating of their own policies leaning more and more towards restricting user behavior on their sites.  Every other week there appears to be some new corporate blogpost on sites like Facebook or Twitter where they are redefining what is and is not acceptable for their own users to do or engage in all the while slowly whittling away the initial appeal that first drew people in to using them.  When the very function of your site is repurposed and redefined so much so that it begins to limit its own use you've reached a critical point in your own suvivability.  After all who will use a Twitter where you can't tweet or a Facebook where you can't post?

Perhaps it's hubris on their part in thinking that now that they've secured a top spot online that they can never lose it.  That of course would be a very flawed outlook as anyone who has been using the internet for the past decade can tell you.  Over the past 10 years there have been a host of sites that became so caught up in their own infalability that they've simply vanished due to driving off their own userbase.  When it comes to websites the King of the Hill is a short lived title and todays Facebook is tomorrows Myspace.

With more and more restrictions being placed on simply using a service and an appeal being made to appease the most easily offended minority on these sites openings begin to appear for their replacements.  As Executives and CEOs make public statements about safe spaces people begin to look elsewhere for the next, better thing.  It tends to be that the more updates made to make a site sustain a large userbase the more it loses it as the things they remove are what drew in the large numbers in the first place and the things they add make it as anti-userfriendly as possible.

140 character statements may be hot shit right now but how many hoops will people jump through to make them?  First it was simply creating an account now it's attaching a phone number if you misbehave and self-censoring to make happy those who think users want to be told what constitutes a "proper tweet".  When the alternative finally does arrive how many of those hoop jumping users will stay to be scolded and how many will leave for greener pastures that remind them of what fun used to be like?