> basic sniff test Here's another whiff from a similar perspective. Back in the day people were using open social media (e.g. Geocities) and posting everythin

> basic sniff test Here's another whiff from a similar perspective. Back in the day people were using open social media (e.g. Geocities) and posting everything on a public web that was searchable (if poorly) and generally laterally browsable by "web surfers". It was an ocean of content that we meandered in, finding all kinds of goodness and weirdness. Then came myspace, which was like geocities v2, also wildly customizable and completely devoid of any access control. The standard of the day was "put it on the web in the open." Now, if we all were to go into the lovely walled garden of Facebook and keep our accounts private (AFAIK this is pretty standard), there will be no way for us to stumble into new things. We have to become vetted, to be friends, and then we can start to share. This can only reduce the relative amount of stuff on the open web, and in the extreme will completely destroy it. If we were all only on Facebook with our pages hidden then there would be 0 new things on the internet. From any perspective this would mean that there is less interesting content out there. This is basically the direction things are going. Yes--- there is a lot more stuff on the net. Yes, this is a good thing. Probably we are overstating things if we say that the internet is shrinking and getting worse, but just imagine if all those people were happily posting in the open. We'd all be surfing on that sea of content. EDIT: submitted my comment early by accident