Mark Zuckerberg's network effects nightmare

Hello and welcome back to Trending, Business Insider's weekly look at the world of tech. I'm Alexei Oreskovic, Business Insider's West Coast Bureau Chief and Global Tech Editor. If you want to get Trending in your email inbox every Wednesday, $4

This week: Tech's "surge" of goodbyes and Facebook's network effects nightmare

The tech business thrives on newness — new products, new features, new speeds. Even when the new stuff is really just old stuff with a new name, you can be sure there will a press release to mark the occasion (see: $4, circa 2017; and $4, circa 2018).

But a lot of changes in tech lately have involved eliminating things.

• Let's start with the Segway, or "Ginger" as the self-balancing two-wheeler was once nicknamed.>$4 The Segway rolled into the sunset this week: After nearly two decades ferrying tourists and security guards, the "human transporter" that was supposed to revolutionize society $4
  
  While the Segway was buried under a warm blanket of nostalgia, Uber's $4 Video footage of Uber demolishing thousands of e-bikes from a company it spent $200 million to acquire two years earlier struck many as wasteful and as another indictment of the tech industry's problematic values.
  
  
• Microsoft pulled the plug on two fairly big projects recently, including its $4(much to the chagrin of Business Insider Deputy Editor Matthew Weinberger) and the Mixer online streaming service.
  
  The end of Mixer was especially surprising, as Microsoft had just shelled out tens of millions of dollars to attract top-tier talent like game streamers "Ninja" and "Shroud." Ashley Stewart and Ben Gilbert $4
• And then, there's been a seemingly spontaneous rush to banish the trolls and to shun their enablers. $4 is significant mainly in the fact that it's taken the companies so long to do so little.

The advertising boycott of Facebook, however, is gaining a surprising momentum that feels like a nightmare version of the network effects that helped Facebook grow its audience so rapidly. Instead of users' sociability contributing to Facebook's value, the peer pressure among advertisers is now working against it.

Just a couple of weeks ago a handful of brands announced plans to stop advertising on Facebook because of its policies allowing toxic or misleading content. Now the $4

Is the Facebook boycott approaching a "tipping point" that could significantly harm its revenue? That depends on how long the marketer's resolve lasts. An anonymous $4 "I'm constantly fighting with our business leads who think it's killing their business to not be on Facebook.

And this CMO's perspective on other companies in the boycott says a lot:

"Half the CMOs out there are sincere. The other half are doing it because they're worried about being tone-deaf," the person said. "They've all written their boycott statements vaguely enough so they can keep their options open and come back to Facebook."

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