410 Gone

the resource is intentionally unavailable

the server owner desires that remote links to that resource be removed. (Fielding et al. 1999)

Online suicide

Infosuicide/infocide

Disengaging from the Internet via the deletion of all your publicly available information. (quadhome 2011)

Flounce

proclaim[ing] that they are leaving a community forever… leav[ing] a long ass, boring, nonsensical post explaining why they are so much more highly evolved than anyone else in the community. (Dramatica 2011)

Flouncing FB

Also

Who’s quitting Twitter this week?

Of more than 140,000 Twitter users who announced they were moving to Mastodon, just 1.6 per cent have actually quit Elon Musk’s social media platform. (Stokel-Walker 2022)

Method

Communities

open and voluntary communities producing free cultural products

Time

2006-2012

Data

100+ sources

Approach

naturalistic inquiry via theoretical sampling / emergent design

Analysis

iteratively coding sources into various categories

(1) Real Exhaustion

“It’s time for me to find a new hobby. Preferably one that doesn’t involve angle brackets. Or computers. Or electricity.” (Pilgrim 2004 qtd in rileyw 2011)

(2) Community discontent

I have lost all my belief in the wikimedia projects. On some projects I still have moderating bits, I hereby ask the stewards to take these bits away as I do not wish to spend too much time anymore on the projects, I might shout a bit from the sideline. (vanKalken 2006)

(3) Privacy: The collision of the real and virtual

Why the Lucky Stiff vanished on August 2009. Almost all of his Internet accounts were closed, all his websites went down, even the code repositories that he released as open source were removed. The real motive for his disappearance is and will always be a mystery, but the best clue is that his identity had finally been discovered. (Terror 2012)

(1) Silence

(2) Drama

Bye bye. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out, you whining prima donna (Anonymous 2010).

(3) Sleuthing

If anyone is in direct contact with Mark, please let me know that he’s okay …, even if his internet presence has been erased. As much as I hate for the world to lose all of the incredible information he’s created and shared, that would be as nothing compared to losing the man himself (Meyer 2011)

a little later…

Mark Pilgrim is alive/annoyed we called the police. Please stand down and give the man privacy and space, and thanks everyone for caring. (Scott 2011)

Prominent sleuthing

• Mark Pilgrim made The Economist blog
• Phil Agre made NPR
• “JZ’s” mysterious ailment made Boing Boing

(4) Thanks and mirrors

Barnstar for missing Wikipedians

Mirrors of _why’s work

Infocide…

can be an antecedent to suicide and …

• a consequence of online exhaustion and discontent
• a dramatic performance
• a privacy-protecting measure

Responses include being…

• ignored
• lamented
• sleuthed
• and mitigated via preservation

Yet, should people be able to infocide?

The right to be forgotten?

Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age Viktor Mayer-Schönberge

but Infocide > removing an embarrassing MySpace page

Google vs CNIL (2019)

What, if anything, should communities do?

ex. Wikipedia retirement

1. I will divide you into small groups, 20 retired Wikipedian per group.
2. investigate when and why people left (see history and Talk page)
3. document in Google sheet

Wrap up

• In what community would you think it be neat to study exit?
• How would you go about it?

• In what community would you think it be neat to study exit?
• How would you go about it?