I liked Facebook early on when it was set up in a way that was pretty easy to customize (even with plug-ins). It felt easier than creating a custom web page —

I liked Facebook early on when it was set up in a way that was pretty easy to customize (even with plug-ins). It felt easier than creating a custom web page — even as someone with the skills to do so — and it was more likely to actually be seen by people that I knew. Then they started compartmentalizing everything. After awhile, if you wanted to mention something that didn’t have a field in their form, there wasn’t really anywhere to put that. All the plug-ins went away. Then I started to realize that if I learned too much about things by reading a feed, I had no idea what to talk about in person because I already “knew” everything. Ironically a social platform was making real social behavior more difficult. Eventually though, knowing things was not exactly beneficial because it was like dirty laundry. Paragraphs and paragraphs of stuff that I didn’t want to see. Oh, great: didn’t know that co-worker was actually super-religious and was going to start posting every possible religious thing that crossed his inbox [hide]. Oh, great: friends that go to the same places every single weekend and post the same maps of those places and the same pictures every single time [hide]. Oh, great: pages of the latest political diatribes [hide]. Oh, great: 50 things I have already seen on Reddit [hide]. These days if I do log in, I can scroll for quite awhile and see nothing interesting at all, even after being gone from Facebook for a week. That means it’s become a glorified address book, which is kind of where we started and perhaps where we should have always remained. What is the multi-billion-dollar “value” of Facebook now?