Cory Doctorow, in his article, Social Quitting, highlights how social media have life cycles.

One day, they were sparsely populated fringe services, the next day, every­one you knew was using them and you had to sign up to stay in touch. Then, just as quickly, they imploded, turning into ghost towns, then punchlines, then forgotten ruins.

He also explains why social media monoliths can be impossible to switch out of due to network effects:

This enshittification was made possible by high switch­ing costs. The vast communities who’d been brought in by network effects were so valuable that users couldn’t afford to quit, because that would mean giving up on important personal, professional, commercial, and romantic ties. And just to make sure that users didn’t sneak away, Facebook aggressively litigated against upstarts that made it possible to stay in touch with your friends without using its services. Twitter consistently whittled away at its API support, neuter­ing it in ways that made it harder and harder to leave Twitter without giving up the value it gave you.

When switching costs are high, services can be changed in ways that you dislike without losing your business. The higher the switching costs, the more a company can abuse you, because it knows that as bad as they’ve made things for you, you’d have to endure worse if you left.

Because they had so many of the people that mattered to us trapped inside them, and because they made it so hard to leave, they could really treat us like garbage without risking our departure. They cut the surplus to the bone.

Well, we are now at “to the bone” stage. I hope we users have learned our lesson and never hang our network too much on these outlets in the future.