Simple contagion drives population-scale platform migration
2025/05/30 by Dorian Quelle, Quelle, Dorian, Frederic Denker +5 · 14 voices · 2 citations
Computer Science · Social Sciences · #Web and Library Services #Radio, Podcasts, and Digital Media
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2505.24801
Abstract
Social media platforms mediate professional communication, political expression, and community formation, making the rare instances when users collectively abandon an incumbent platform particularly consequential. Strong network effects raise switching costs and strengthen incumbents' positions, making coordinated exit difficult. Here we link 276,431 scholars on Twitter/X to their respective new profiles among the universe of all 16.7 million Bluesky accounts, tracked from January 2023 to December 2024, using a scalable, high-precision cross-platform matching pipeline. Exploiting exogenous variation from Brazil's court-ordered suspension of Twitter/X and a dynamic matching design, we show that adoption is peer-driven, treatment effects are short-lived and dose-dependent, and contagion is simple, not complex. Three patterns characterize adoption and retention. Adoption concentrates among users deeply embedded in Twitter's social graph. Public political expression predicts migration, consistent with homophilous inflows into a largely left-of-center Bluesky information space. Early reconnection with prior contacts predicts longer tenure and engagement. Our findings provide the first population-scale causal evidence of peer influence in a social media platform migration by exploiting exogenous exposure variation in a natural experiment and using daily dynamic matching. Rather than the complex contagion mechanism often emphasized in the literature, contagion is predominantly simple. Our findings recast migration as a multi-homing strategy that insures against governance uncertainty and show that users who quickly reconnect with prior contacts remain active longer on Bluesky.
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- Some interesting insights here, including that people are much more influenced by *people they follow* switching platforms than by their own *followers* switching platforms. Preprint: "Why Academics a [bsky, 1053 points, 21 comments]
- Preprint: "Why Academics are Leaving Twitter for #Bluesky" (via #arXiv) arxiv.org/abs/2505.24801 @bsky.app #socialmedia [bsky, 68 points, 1 comments]
- New preprint out today on Why Academics Are Leaving Twitter for Bluesky: arxiv.org/abs/2505.24801 By @dorianquelle.bsky.social @fdenker.bsky.social and @prashantgarg.bsky.social. Just in time for Dor [bsky, 59 points, 0 comments]
- Spannend - ich habe das eben im Bus überflogen. Das Paper untersucht im Kern, warum wissenschaftliche und akademische Nutzer (insbesondere Forschende) zunehmend von X zu Bluesky wechseln: - Diskursqua [bsky, 36 points, 1 comments]
- Preprint: "Why Academics are Leaving Twitter for Bluesky" arxiv.org/abs/2505.24801 [bsky, 28 points, 0 comments]
- 2/2 Le papier "Why Academics Are Leaving Twitter for Bluesky ?" peut être lu ici : arxiv.org/pdf/2505.24801 [bsky, 23 points, 3 comments]
- 7/ Big picture: Academic migration isn’t a “rage-quit” but a network-driven shift where who you read outweighs who reads you. Link to the pre-print: arxiv.org/abs/2505.24801 Curious to hear how this m [bsky, 14 points, 0 comments]
- It's on you to get your friends and colleagues off of twitter. Pass it along. [bsky, 11 points, 2 comments]
- Why Academics Are Leaving Twitter for Bluesky [hn, 7 points, 1 comments]
- Why Academics Are Leaving Twitter for Bluesky [hn, 7 points, 0 comments]
- arxiv.org/abs/2505.24801 [bsky, 1 points, 0 comments]
- this is, I think, a faulty premise. by staying you are anchoring people there with your presence, by leaving you fracture the social connections that people use to justify staying on Twitter. [bsky, 1 points, 1 comments]
- arxiv.org/abs/2505.24801 이런게 있다고 하네요 'ㅅ') [bsky, 0 points, 0 comments]
- Preprint: Why # Academics Are Leaving Twitter for # Bluesky (via # arXiv ) https:// arxiv.org/abs/2505.24801 @bsky.app # socialmedia [mastodon, 0 points, 0 comments]
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