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I have the same nostalgia and even some more:
It is noteworthy that "The Facebook" startet as the hip place for students and required a university email address for signup. Imagine being a young adult moving for the first time away from home and to the big new city and starting your new exciting student life, only that you know no one, everyone is a stranger, and university life is complicated in all kind of ways. If I recall correctly TheFacebook had group chats, like mini message boards, which were made by students for every course (and of course used for organizing partying). You could stay organized. You could connect. This was a very useful and fun service. I wonder if it was lightning in a bottle or could it be replicated today? The students I know today organize with group chats on WhatsApp (I think this is less a thing in the States?). And Family networks also moved to group chats. But this is not discoverable (which to be true is a big feature as it provides intimacy/privacy, but it also loses something).
What changed? You say it was monetization which drove more and more antisocial features, but there was also a big vibe change when everyone could join and your grandma first time commented disapprovingly your binge drinking party pics. And does one want your colleagues and work aquaintances see your children pictures or "its complicated" relationship status? Anyone remember Google Circles? They tried to out-facebook Facebook, but couldn't make the separation of friend circles stick as managing "circles" was too cumbersome. (Was it though? We do it fine in group messengers.)
The other explanation is that Facebook was always doomed to doom-scroll, as every new generation tries to find their own new cool thing but like all non-crab crustaceans evolve into crabs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation) all "social" networks seem to evolve into anti-social doom scroll time sinks: Twitter -> SnapChat -> Instagram -> TikTok
This is exactly what it was for me.
... and then they took all of my private posts and photos and made them public to the entire world. I don't think I can ever feel the same trust for an internet service ever again.
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I think the big thing dooming Facebook was that it didn’t recognize the difference between social circles for a long time, which leads to a kind of self censorship. Once people understood that anyone you’d friended could see everything, it became pretty clear that you couldn’t say just anything on Facebook because everyone from your boss to your granny could see it. Posting wild party pictures, or talking with your friends in ways that would offend people became a potential liability.
I think some of this was inevitable as social norms became established, but Facebook definitely missed the chance to shape those differently. I know quite a few who, say, don't post pictures of their kids on the internet. I don't think they could have prevented anyone from adopting that norm, but they could have tried to make it feel "safe" to share things before the last decade of, I dunno, whatever this has been. No amount of "Trust and Safety" can restore naivety, but maybe we could have been let down more gently.
The norms that existed before became the issue. Facebook didn’t implement any sort of system to separate your social networks. If you posted to “friends” anyone you friended could see it. So you couldn’t keep your coworkers from finding out about your drinking binge or your granny from seeing your post that’s slightly racy and meant for your twenty-something friends. The norm that developed was “only post stuff you’d tell your boss about and feel comfortable talking about in front of granny” because they could see it. Of course this creates a fairly safe-space vibe where only the most boring stuff gets posted and you have to be absolutely on your office manners the whole time.
The fun part of social media is that on a really good space, you get to be yourself. You don’t have to worry about what someone will report to the boss and so on. Facebook sucks because it’s basically part of a social network score alongside your credit score that determines how well you fit in mainstream social structures.
Google Plus at the time tried to make "circles" happen, but that lost to network effects and IMO explicitly separating your social networks is more work than it sounds like. Which I think explains why people are adopting different networks for different content: think LinkedIn versus a Discord between gaming buddies. Or my pseudonymous
shiteffortposting account here. Although some still shout unprofessional takes into the Ether with their real names.Yeah, I remember thinking that Google Plus had some good ideas, but it was just too much work to use it properly. It's easier and more natural to just think like "LinkedIn is for work, Instagram is for hot pics, twitter is for politics." Facebook is for baby pics and connecting to my elderly relatives.
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