Critical Mass and Discontinued Use of Social Media

Using simulation, this study compares a critical mass of adopters with a critical mass of those who discontinue their adoption of social media. A network of reflex agents is simulated where each agent has an unchanging threshold and will adopt social media if the number of their friends who have adopted is greater than it. In the first study, the size of the critical mass that adopts is varied, and in the second, the size of the critical mass that discontinues use is varied. The studies show that a critical mass of leavers can cause a community to fail and that this mass can potentially be as small as that needed to influence a community to succeed; although given a certain critical mass, their leaving is less likely to cause failure than their adoption is success. This influence of the critical mass is facilitated by network structure. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.