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Before Facebook, if I lost someone's contact information, and drifted outside of their social circle for a long enough time, chances were I would never ever see

Before Facebook, if I lost someone's contact information, and drifted outside of their social circle for a long enough time, chances were I would never ever see or speak to that person again. Before Facebook, if people wanted to organize conversation and cooperation on an information technology platform, the options were to pay $X00-$X000 for a proprietary system, get lucky enough to know about mailing lists, have someone who knew sysadmin do it basically for free, or have everyone learn how to use something like IRC. Social networking was an enormous pain in the ass. Facebook was the first platform that actually worked for people. Every subsequent social network took their cues from Facebook, it was a veritable sea change in the state of the Internet. The problem here isn't Facebook, you'd be having these growing pains with any useful social networking technology platform. It's the unintended consequences of Facebook's universal accessibility. Anybody can use Facebook, and so everybody will. It's the story of technology all over again. Technology is invented, we have a honeymoon phase, then the real marriage begins. We're in the "just had a baby, now we need to get it to a year old so we can all relax" phase. It'll get better.

sephoric 8y ago
I think the "have everyone learn how to use something like IRC" solution would have been a lot more feasible if the technology behind it (servers and clients) didn't stagnate and cater only to technophiles. Most of the concepts of Facebook were around already in UNIX, such as having your own mailbox in your own user account and being able to check it for new mail, wherever it was sent from. Imagine something like AOL in 1995 except instead of real-time chat and single-person email, it also had the few features of Facebook. They weren't missing the technology, they were just missing the imagination and the realization that connecting groups over longer term (followable status updates) was higher priority than connecting individuals over a longer term (email) or connecting groups in the immediate term (chat).
wronnng 8y ago
Facebook was NOT the first platform that actually worked for people.
sbarre 8y ago
While this may all be true, how do we prevent Facebook from becoming a "factory town"? As more and more of our seemingly public discourse moves online, we are congregating in very much non-public spaces that have their own motives that are often at odds with the public good. I know Facebook, Twitter and co. need to make money somehow, that's fine, but there's more to this.. How do we reconcile US-based for-profit corporations becoming the stewards of public discourse for an ever-growing part of the world's population?
tfandango 8y ago
That is exactly how I feel, we have something that can be used for good things and bad things. It's not surprising that people use it for bad things, and our inexperience in responsibly using these platforms enables this misuse. However watch-out, things will get better when the baby turns 1, until about 13, then it will get worse... much worse!!!
mAEStro-paNDa 8y ago
I agree much with your premise here. The capabilities that social media have provided are extremely valuable. That said, I disagree with your conclusion. The issues that have come from Facebook and others are due to centralization, commodification of user data, the proliferation of echo chambers and advertising. Universal accessibility isn't the culprit, although that has generated issues on it's own as well.
- vertexFarm 8y ago
  Just out of curiosity, what capabilities do you think are extremely valuable? This isn't an attack or anything, I ask with sincerity.
  - mAEStro-paNDa 8y ago
    This part could go with some rephrasing. Otherwise, first thing to come to mind is Twitter. Connecting directly to journalists and representatives, current events as they unfold in real-time, seem invaluable to me. Despite being in the era of the tweeting POTUS, and one where trust in the media is at a low, this still appears to be a net positive capability.
claudiulodro 8y ago
> Before Facebook, if people wanted to organize conversation and cooperation on an information technology platform, the options were to pay $X00-$X000 for a proprietary system, get lucky enough to know about mailing lists, have someone who knew sysadmin do it basically for free, or have everyone learn how to use something like IRC. There were like 20 years in between what you describe and Facebook's dominance. Before Facebook there were thousands of thriving independent forums on wide varieties of topics. I spent large portions of my teenage years on them and got way more value out of them than I have out of any Facebook group.
- vinceguidry 8y ago
  Those forums were expensive. It wasn't until I had been contributing to them for years until I thought to ask just how much a vBulletin license cost. And phpBB was hard to administer, had security problems, which were exacerbated by the lack of experience of forum administrators. And you had to maintain hosting, which wasn't a trivial expense back in those days.
  - mattnewton 8y ago
    There were ample ad supported solutions that were pretty painless. Source: set up several invision free forums for my friends in 5th grade. Never touched a server and had no idea what we were doing, but used it constantly to stay in touch.
    - vinceguidry 8y ago
      I'm not saying there weren't options. But you had to hear about them and learn how to use them, and then people would complain endlessly about your choices anyway. Facebook democratized social networking.
      - herbst 8y ago
        Same with Facebook?
      - 8y ago
WhompingWindows 8y ago
From my perspective, it's only gotten worse over time with FB. How do you explain the numerous privacy/data breaches, FB data being used to undermine democracy and spread disinformation, and its monopolistic practices preventing other "partners" from competing with the marriage. To use your marriage analogy, this is a MESSED UP marriage. FB is like a spouse preventing you from even socializing with other people of their own gender if they even are a minor threat (i.e. Insta and Whats App getting bought up). FB is a partner who snoops on all your apps without permission. FB is a partner who manipulates your behavior with ads. What kind of marriage is this? Would you marry someone who has been the subject of numerous scandals? In my view, FB's small upsides of meeting up with distant friends who I honestly don't care for, that's not even 50% recompense for its downsides for me.
- bshimmin 8y ago
  FB is a partner who snoops on all your apps without permission. Facebook is a partner who snoops on your Facebook without permission!
fbn79 8y ago
Facebook innovation was not to connect with friends (many other sites / services was doing it). Facebook innovation was the news feed: all friends news in a single time ordered infinite scrollable page. The value of facebook is how good it is to keep the newsfeed interesting.
- rchaud 8y ago
  Honestly, outside of the tech innovation, FB's biggest "in" was its exclusivity. - First, you HAD to have a Harvard .edu address. For a lot of the general public, Harvard is top of mind when people think 'elite' institution - Next, they expanded it, but only to other US schools with .edu domains. That's when I joined, around 2005. - Finally, they opened it up to the general public everywhere, and by that time they were almost a household name globally.
  - pxue 8y ago
    adding to that, i believe: fb is one of the first social implementation of b.j. fogg's behavior model + and engineered addiction, and the subsequent commoditization of likes and shares
    - LrnByTeach 8y ago
      facebook > fb is one of the first social implementation of b.j. fogg's behavior model + and engineered addiction, and the subsequent commoditization of likes and shares
  - extra88 8y ago
    Yes, the method of rollout was helpful in its adoption. The name recognition of the first institutions (first Harvard, then other Ivies and other selective schools) was helpful in hyping it. I don't think it was a household name in 2006 but the rate of adoption did help it garner attention from the press. Not rushing into generating revenue helped. Handling scaling up well, compared to its social media competitors, helped.
- herbst 8y ago
rhino369 8y ago
>Social networking was an enormous pain in the ass. Facebook was the first platform that actually worked for people. Every subsequent social network took their cues from Facebook, it was a veritable sea change in the state of the Internet. Even today, Facebook and Linkedin are the only social networks where you have a decent chance of finding someone by searching their real name. It's very powerful.
packetpirate 8y ago
> Before Facebook, if people wanted to organize conversation and cooperation on an information technology platform, the options were to pay $X00-$X000 for a proprietary system, get lucky enough to know about mailing lists, have someone who knew sysadmin do it basically for free, or have everyone learn how to use something like IRC. Did you just drop off the planet between 1995 - 2005? Poor Myspace... everybody just forgot it ever existed. And AIM... ICQ... MSN... Yahoo... not to mention the endless forums on every single conceivable subject. Nobody I knew in the late 90s and early 2000s wasn't using AIM or some other comparable program. It wasn't hard to keep in touch with people. Facebook didn't invent social networking. All it did was give people a platform to vomit out their every thought for all their friends to see at once.
- iooi 8y ago
  Your parents were on ICQ? And AIM? They set up a Myspace account? Facebook is easy to use and accessible everywhere. This is coming from someone that hasn't had a Facebook account since 2009. GP makes great points and the title to this submission is pure clickbait.
  - toxik 8y ago
    When ICQ, AIM, MySpace etc were popular, the babyboomer generation was not really widely adapted to computers like they are today. I don't think Facebook has been the reason they eventually did, either -- my grandmother, for example, doesn't have Facebook, but e-mails and texts.
  - dopamean 8y ago
    My whole family was on ICQ when I was a kid. This may not actually be true but my understanding back then was that ICQ was pretty popular internationally (most of my family lives outside of the US).
    - tinco 8y ago
      Yes, ICQ was popular just before the internet went full on mainstream, MSN and Yahoo messenger followed it up, followed by a brief Google chat and Skype stint and then a void filled up by the social networks and eventually the mobile messengers like WhatsApp. MSN being killed is still so weird to me, I get that The Netherlands is a small country, but they had full 100% market dominance, after MSN got killed I bet some researcher could have seen people in The Netherlands just had a communication dip for a year or two.
alpinemeadow 8y ago
I think you, like many, are confusing the impact of ubiquitous data on our mobile phones with Facebook. We are not more connected because Facebook. We are more connected because data pipes are everywhere and I can drink all the time.
ankmathur96 8y ago
An aspect of this which has not been very well engaged with is how people see Facebook and its products outside of America. A common response to this from pundits is that it's an American company and therefore American values and perspectives matter more (as if American perspectives are the definitively superior kind). Without question, Facebook-owned products have democratized communication in third world countries (like India for example) and empowered those people to take advantage of the internet and its convenience. There's more than can go into a HN comment here, but an example is street side stores that have hugely expanded their audience by taking orders on Whatsapp. It just wasn't accessible to do this before, and Facebook has made that happen. At some level, much of the criticism of Facebook (especially DHH) don't even try to put into words what Facebook "breach" they're upset about. Is it Cambridge Analytica? Is it one of the drummed up NYT pieces? If you care about this problem, yelling and waiting for someone to break up Facebook isn't a solution. We need discourse to identity what realistic changes we as a community expect.
eysquared 8y ago
I disagree. While Facebook may have started that way, they actively took steps to "drive engagement" and get people hooked. They gamified social media for ad revenue and turned the platform into what it is today. Had it stayed merely as a way for people to connect then I don't think they would be seeing nearly the same amount of backlash.
penglish1 8y ago
The internet may get better, but it is not not guaranteed. And I predict that if it does it will be despite Facebook, not because of, or with it. Social networking was NOT an enormous pain in the ass. Everybody had, and still has email - it was the gateway to the internet. Roughly since the beginning of the internet. And all the people that joined. Email got used in almost all of the ways that Facebook did. In addition to email, there were ways to do "roughly" everything Facebook did with varying levels of difficulty - some roughly unobtainium for the "later billions" of people that Facebook drew - not just email based listservs, but USENET before that, self hostedweb forums starting in the 90's, Craigslist in the commercial space. The problem IS Facebook (and in a different but related way, Google). UNlike Craigslist (for example), Facebook is a public company. But it is not accountable to the public, as we've seen over and over again. It's users are a commodity and are not stakeholders in any meaningful way. But - even the shareholders are not. Zuck owns AND controls it almost entirely. And unlike Craig Newmark (who isn't perfect), Zuck appears to have been deeply flawed from the very beginning, and the poison of unearthly money and power have only made it worse.
- y4mi 8y ago
  email addresses were treated as disposable and temporary from how i remember it before gmail went mainstream. providers came and went and custom domains for emails were extremely rare... at least in my circles
  - ciupicri 8y ago
    What was so special about Gmail? Except for the user interface and mailbox size, Hotmail and Yahoo were just as good and people used them for a long time.
    - y4mi 8y ago
      not sure, to be honest. thats how it was in my circles until ~05-06. everyone kept switching emails and used a different address on each service/forum. until gmail came along. suddenly everyone used their gmail address for everything. and even that got phased out when facebook came along.
JohnJamesRambo 8y ago
Is this satire? It can’t be real.
mjevans 8y ago
As someone that refuses to use a man-in-the-middle social platform without federation and without open interface protocols (email is fine in that respect as there are choices of provider and fully open protocols), Facebook and anything like it have only made my life worse. It is amazing how lazy at socializing everyone is, how if you aren't on the platform they happen to be using you are an afterthought, if you're a thought at all.
blueboo 8y ago
before facebook you were 14
michaelchisari 8y ago
Before Facebook, if I lost someone's contact information, and drifted outside of their social circle for a long enough time, chances were I would never ever see or speak to that person again. Bear with me here... Was that such a terrible thing? I always dreamed about reconnecting with old friends, and then I did, and many times reality did not live up.
- rjkennedy98 8y ago
  More than that, it changed what a "friend" was. I remember the first time someone talked about having 5,000 "friends" on Facebook. It felt so bizarre hearing that and still does. It used to be your "friends" were the people you were close to and they knew your secrets, and talked to about things that mattered. Somehow Facebook made it so that your "friends" were people who connected with you on Facebook and who could view your feed and profile. A very bad thing for everyone IMO.
  - extra88 8y ago
    Words can have different meanings in different contexts. Being your friend IRL and being your "friend" on Facebook are very different. Many Facebook friends are what you might call "acquaintances" IRL. Plus there's all your family, immediate an extended, who aren't really truly your friends but are called such on Facebook. BTW even IRL, knowing my secrets would be more indicative of close family and close friends, a wider circle of people can still be my friend without that level of intimacy.
sametmax 8y ago
Never had a fb account. I travel all the time. I don't have any problem with networking or keeping in touch. Those are artificial excuses to use a tool optimized and abused for faking ones life and lurking on others.
Florin_Andrei 8y ago
> We're in the "just had a baby, now we need to get it to a year old so we can all relax" phase. Complete with loud screaming, soiled diapers, puke on the shoulder, and so on.
nathan_long 8y ago
> Before Facebook, if I lost someone's contact information, and drifted outside of their social circle for a long enough time, chances were I would never ever see or speak to that person again. I was nodding along at this until I read your second paragraph, then had to go back. Apparently you think this was a bad thing? Losing touch with people is natural. Having to explicitly sever a relationship is awkward. But without a natural pruning function, it's easy to end up with a thousand shallow relationships and not enough deep ones.
- _red 8y ago
  Imagine the guy that sat next to you in freshmen algebra class. Now imagine still having him on your 'friends list' 20 years later... People are being hyper-socialized. Its not normal and no doubt causes people increased mental stress.
Zelphyr 8y ago
> Before Facebook, if I lost someone's contact information, and drifted outside of their social circle for a long enough time, chances were I would never ever see or speak to that person again. Not really. Chances are, I knew someone who knew that person and could ask them for the contact information. Before Facebook, how do you think people coordinated class reunions decades after graduation, decades after having spoken with most of the people in their class? Sure, it's easier now, but it wasn't as difficult as you make it out to be. > Before Facebook, if people wanted to organize conversation and cooperation on an information technology platform, the options were to pay $X00-$X000 for a proprietary system, get lucky enough to know about mailing lists, have someone who knew sysadmin do it basically for free, or have everyone learn how to use something like IRC. Again, it really wasn't that hard. You found where the groups you wanted to hang out with were online. It wasn't restricted to mailing lists or IRC. There were forums, etc... And no, you never needed to know a sysadmin to do any of that. That's just silly. > Social networking was an enormous pain in the ass. No it wasn't. You talked to people through the channels you had available to you or, even better, in person! All Facebook, and social media in general, has done is centralize all of that. I'd argue we're now seeing that such centralization isn't a good thing. You're right that the problem isn't necessarily Facebook's fault, it's how people are using it and we're just not good at using it. However, I counter that Facebook knows this and is taking full advantage of it for their own benefit. They're purposely showing things to people that they know will get them riled up so they will comment and spend more time on the site. That's just unethical. It will not get better as long as current management and thinking is leading Facebook.
lorinm 8y ago
>Before Facebook, if I lost someone's contact information, and drifted outside of their social circle for a long enough time, chances were I would never ever see or speak to that person again. And chances are you are never going to speak to that person again even if you are friends on facebook. The only thing that facebook invented is how to increase user engagement by finding loopholes in our psychology and get us addicted to their products. Facebook did not invent anything other than making this world more chaotic.
vertexFarm 8y ago
Eeeehhh I don't think that's as guaranteed as you make it out to be. Surviving technologies had a honeymoon phase, a disillusionment, and then they even out into a plateau. Not all technologies are guaranteed to survive forever and end up like this though, there are many examples of things that just plain weren't worth it once the true costs were revealed. It's fine to lose touch with people. Some people are meant to drift away as you move forward in life, you can't have everything all the time. Those people still drift away even with facebook, you just have this illusion that they're still in your life. Often you have to watch their bizarre posts as they get old and go nuts. Or some arbitrary algo hides them from you anyway, and you forget they are even in your friends list. This is just me, but I think I'd rather have the fuzzy memories of some high school friend and the closure; the certainty of knowing that chapter of life is done. If both of us can't be bothered to put forth the minimum required effort to keep in touch, so be it. Is it really of any value to have a purely symbolic attachment to this person forever? Look through your full friends list and contemplate this for a while. It's not certain yet, but the social cost of facebook could potentially be enormous and damaging. In the end will it really prove worthwhile? Should we put up with the "real marriage" after the honeymoon? If it's a sufficiently rocky marriage--if it's a one-sided and abusive relationship--the rational thing to do is not to hold tight, ignore it and ride it out. The right thing to do is plan for divorce. I think this is yet to be determined, but I'm starting to lean towards the opinion that near-exclusively digital socialization was a mistake.
inkaudio 8y ago
This was the path all viable social networks were heading, than Facebook bought those willing to sell, Instagram & WhatsApp. So no, the problem is Facebook, in particular Facebook method of operation. Things would have been better if Instagram & WhatsApp did not sell to them or it was blocked by regulators. These companies would be serious competitors that operated differently.

sephoric 8y ago

I think the "have everyone learn how to use something like IRC" solution would have been a lot more feasible if the technology behind it (servers and clients) didn't stagnate and cater only to technophiles. Most of the concepts of Facebook were around already in UNIX, such as having your own mailbox in your own user account and being able to check it for new mail, wherever it was sent from. Imagine something like AOL in 1995 except instead of real-time chat and single-person email, it also had the few features of Facebook. They weren't missing the technology, they were just missing the imagination and the realization that connecting groups over longer term (followable status updates) was higher priority than connecting individuals over a longer term (email) or connecting groups in the immediate term (chat).

wronnng 8y ago

Facebook was NOT the first platform that actually worked for people.

sbarre 8y ago

While this may all be true, how do we prevent Facebook from becoming a "factory town"? As more and more of our seemingly public discourse moves online, we are congregating in very much non-public spaces that have their own motives that are often at odds with the public good. I know Facebook, Twitter and co. need to make money somehow, that's fine, but there's more to this.. How do we reconcile US-based for-profit corporations becoming the stewards of public discourse for an ever-growing part of the world's population?

tfandango 8y ago

That is exactly how I feel, we have something that can be used for good things and bad things. It's not surprising that people use it for bad things, and our inexperience in responsibly using these platforms enables this misuse. However watch-out, things will get better when the baby turns 1, until about 13, then it will get worse... much worse!!!

mAEStro-paNDa 8y ago

I agree much with your premise here. The capabilities that social media have provided are extremely valuable. That said, I disagree with your conclusion. The issues that have come from Facebook and others are due to centralization, commodification of user data, the proliferation of echo chambers and advertising. Universal accessibility isn't the culprit, although that has generated issues on it's own as well.

vertexFarm 8y ago
Just out of curiosity, what capabilities do you think are extremely valuable? This isn't an attack or anything, I ask with sincerity.
- mAEStro-paNDa 8y ago
  This part could go with some rephrasing. Otherwise, first thing to come to mind is Twitter. Connecting directly to journalists and representatives, current events as they unfold in real-time, seem invaluable to me. Despite being in the era of the tweeting POTUS, and one where trust in the media is at a low, this still appears to be a net positive capability.

claudiulodro 8y ago

> Before Facebook, if people wanted to organize conversation and cooperation on an information technology platform, the options were to pay $X00-$X000 for a proprietary system, get lucky enough to know about mailing lists, have someone who knew sysadmin do it basically for free, or have everyone learn how to use something like IRC. There were like 20 years in between what you describe and Facebook's dominance. Before Facebook there were thousands of thriving independent forums on wide varieties of topics. I spent large portions of my teenage years on them and got way more value out of them than I have out of any Facebook group.

vinceguidry 8y ago
Those forums were expensive. It wasn't until I had been contributing to them for years until I thought to ask just how much a vBulletin license cost. And phpBB was hard to administer, had security problems, which were exacerbated by the lack of experience of forum administrators. And you had to maintain hosting, which wasn't a trivial expense back in those days.
- mattnewton 8y ago
  There were ample ad supported solutions that were pretty painless. Source: set up several invision free forums for my friends in 5th grade. Never touched a server and had no idea what we were doing, but used it constantly to stay in touch.
  - vinceguidry 8y ago
    I'm not saying there weren't options. But you had to hear about them and learn how to use them, and then people would complain endlessly about your choices anyway. Facebook democratized social networking.
    - herbst 8y ago
      Same with Facebook?
    - 8y ago

WhompingWindows 8y ago

From my perspective, it's only gotten worse over time with FB. How do you explain the numerous privacy/data breaches, FB data being used to undermine democracy and spread disinformation, and its monopolistic practices preventing other "partners" from competing with the marriage. To use your marriage analogy, this is a MESSED UP marriage. FB is like a spouse preventing you from even socializing with other people of their own gender if they even are a minor threat (i.e. Insta and Whats App getting bought up). FB is a partner who snoops on all your apps without permission. FB is a partner who manipulates your behavior with ads. What kind of marriage is this? Would you marry someone who has been the subject of numerous scandals? In my view, FB's small upsides of meeting up with distant friends who I honestly don't care for, that's not even 50% recompense for its downsides for me.

bshimmin 8y ago
FB is a partner who snoops on all your apps without permission. Facebook is a partner who snoops on your Facebook without permission!

fbn79 8y ago

Facebook innovation was not to connect with friends (many other sites / services was doing it). Facebook innovation was the news feed: all friends news in a single time ordered infinite scrollable page. The value of facebook is how good it is to keep the newsfeed interesting.

rchaud 8y ago
Honestly, outside of the tech innovation, FB's biggest "in" was its exclusivity. - First, you HAD to have a Harvard .edu address. For a lot of the general public, Harvard is top of mind when people think 'elite' institution - Next, they expanded it, but only to other US schools with .edu domains. That's when I joined, around 2005. - Finally, they opened it up to the general public everywhere, and by that time they were almost a household name globally.
- pxue 8y ago
  adding to that, i believe: fb is one of the first social implementation of b.j. fogg's behavior model + and engineered addiction, and the subsequent commoditization of likes and shares
  - LrnByTeach 8y ago
    facebook > fb is one of the first social implementation of b.j. fogg's behavior model + and engineered addiction, and the subsequent commoditization of likes and shares
- extra88 8y ago
  Yes, the method of rollout was helpful in its adoption. The name recognition of the first institutions (first Harvard, then other Ivies and other selective schools) was helpful in hyping it. I don't think it was a household name in 2006 but the rate of adoption did help it garner attention from the press. Not rushing into generating revenue helped. Handling scaling up well, compared to its social media competitors, helped.
herbst 8y ago

rhino369 8y ago

>Social networking was an enormous pain in the ass. Facebook was the first platform that actually worked for people. Every subsequent social network took their cues from Facebook, it was a veritable sea change in the state of the Internet. Even today, Facebook and Linkedin are the only social networks where you have a decent chance of finding someone by searching their real name. It's very powerful.

packetpirate 8y ago

> Before Facebook, if people wanted to organize conversation and cooperation on an information technology platform, the options were to pay $X00-$X000 for a proprietary system, get lucky enough to know about mailing lists, have someone who knew sysadmin do it basically for free, or have everyone learn how to use something like IRC. Did you just drop off the planet between 1995 - 2005? Poor Myspace... everybody just forgot it ever existed. And AIM... ICQ... MSN... Yahoo... not to mention the endless forums on every single conceivable subject. Nobody I knew in the late 90s and early 2000s wasn't using AIM or some other comparable program. It wasn't hard to keep in touch with people. Facebook didn't invent social networking. All it did was give people a platform to vomit out their every thought for all their friends to see at once.

iooi 8y ago
Your parents were on ICQ? And AIM? They set up a Myspace account? Facebook is easy to use and accessible everywhere. This is coming from someone that hasn't had a Facebook account since 2009. GP makes great points and the title to this submission is pure clickbait.
- toxik 8y ago
  When ICQ, AIM, MySpace etc were popular, the babyboomer generation was not really widely adapted to computers like they are today. I don't think Facebook has been the reason they eventually did, either -- my grandmother, for example, doesn't have Facebook, but e-mails and texts.
- dopamean 8y ago
  My whole family was on ICQ when I was a kid. This may not actually be true but my understanding back then was that ICQ was pretty popular internationally (most of my family lives outside of the US).
  - tinco 8y ago
    Yes, ICQ was popular just before the internet went full on mainstream, MSN and Yahoo messenger followed it up, followed by a brief Google chat and Skype stint and then a void filled up by the social networks and eventually the mobile messengers like WhatsApp. MSN being killed is still so weird to me, I get that The Netherlands is a small country, but they had full 100% market dominance, after MSN got killed I bet some researcher could have seen people in The Netherlands just had a communication dip for a year or two.

alpinemeadow 8y ago

I think you, like many, are confusing the impact of ubiquitous data on our mobile phones with Facebook. We are not more connected because Facebook. We are more connected because data pipes are everywhere and I can drink all the time.

ankmathur96 8y ago

An aspect of this which has not been very well engaged with is how people see Facebook and its products outside of America. A common response to this from pundits is that it's an American company and therefore American values and perspectives matter more (as if American perspectives are the definitively superior kind). Without question, Facebook-owned products have democratized communication in third world countries (like India for example) and empowered those people to take advantage of the internet and its convenience. There's more than can go into a HN comment here, but an example is street side stores that have hugely expanded their audience by taking orders on Whatsapp. It just wasn't accessible to do this before, and Facebook has made that happen. At some level, much of the criticism of Facebook (especially DHH) don't even try to put into words what Facebook "breach" they're upset about. Is it Cambridge Analytica? Is it one of the drummed up NYT pieces? If you care about this problem, yelling and waiting for someone to break up Facebook isn't a solution. We need discourse to identity what realistic changes we as a community expect.

eysquared 8y ago

I disagree. While Facebook may have started that way, they actively took steps to "drive engagement" and get people hooked. They gamified social media for ad revenue and turned the platform into what it is today. Had it stayed merely as a way for people to connect then I don't think they would be seeing nearly the same amount of backlash.

penglish1 8y ago

The internet may get better, but it is not not guaranteed. And I predict that if it does it will be despite Facebook, not because of, or with it. Social networking was NOT an enormous pain in the ass. Everybody had, and still has email - it was the gateway to the internet. Roughly since the beginning of the internet. And all the people that joined. Email got used in almost all of the ways that Facebook did. In addition to email, there were ways to do "roughly" everything Facebook did with varying levels of difficulty - some roughly unobtainium for the "later billions" of people that Facebook drew - not just email based listservs, but USENET before that, self hostedweb forums starting in the 90's, Craigslist in the commercial space. The problem IS Facebook (and in a different but related way, Google). UNlike Craigslist (for example), Facebook is a public company. But it is not accountable to the public, as we've seen over and over again. It's users are a commodity and are not stakeholders in any meaningful way. But - even the shareholders are not. Zuck owns AND controls it almost entirely. And unlike Craig Newmark (who isn't perfect), Zuck appears to have been deeply flawed from the very beginning, and the poison of unearthly money and power have only made it worse.

y4mi 8y ago
email addresses were treated as disposable and temporary from how i remember it before gmail went mainstream. providers came and went and custom domains for emails were extremely rare... at least in my circles
- ciupicri 8y ago
  What was so special about Gmail? Except for the user interface and mailbox size, Hotmail and Yahoo were just as good and people used them for a long time.
  - y4mi 8y ago
    not sure, to be honest. thats how it was in my circles until ~05-06. everyone kept switching emails and used a different address on each service/forum. until gmail came along. suddenly everyone used their gmail address for everything. and even that got phased out when facebook came along.

JohnJamesRambo 8y ago

Is this satire? It can’t be real.

mjevans 8y ago

As someone that refuses to use a man-in-the-middle social platform without federation and without open interface protocols (email is fine in that respect as there are choices of provider and fully open protocols), Facebook and anything like it have only made my life worse. It is amazing how lazy at socializing everyone is, how if you aren't on the platform they happen to be using you are an afterthought, if you're a thought at all.

blueboo 8y ago

before facebook you were 14

michaelchisari 8y ago

Before Facebook, if I lost someone's contact information, and drifted outside of their social circle for a long enough time, chances were I would never ever see or speak to that person again. Bear with me here... Was that such a terrible thing? I always dreamed about reconnecting with old friends, and then I did, and many times reality did not live up.

rjkennedy98 8y ago
More than that, it changed what a "friend" was. I remember the first time someone talked about having 5,000 "friends" on Facebook. It felt so bizarre hearing that and still does. It used to be your "friends" were the people you were close to and they knew your secrets, and talked to about things that mattered. Somehow Facebook made it so that your "friends" were people who connected with you on Facebook and who could view your feed and profile. A very bad thing for everyone IMO.
- extra88 8y ago
  Words can have different meanings in different contexts. Being your friend IRL and being your "friend" on Facebook are very different. Many Facebook friends are what you might call "acquaintances" IRL. Plus there's all your family, immediate an extended, who aren't really truly your friends but are called such on Facebook. BTW even IRL, knowing my secrets would be more indicative of close family and close friends, a wider circle of people can still be my friend without that level of intimacy.

sametmax 8y ago

Never had a fb account. I travel all the time. I don't have any problem with networking or keeping in touch. Those are artificial excuses to use a tool optimized and abused for faking ones life and lurking on others.

Florin_Andrei 8y ago

> We're in the "just had a baby, now we need to get it to a year old so we can all relax" phase. Complete with loud screaming, soiled diapers, puke on the shoulder, and so on.

nathan_long 8y ago

> Before Facebook, if I lost someone's contact information, and drifted outside of their social circle for a long enough time, chances were I would never ever see or speak to that person again. I was nodding along at this until I read your second paragraph, then had to go back. Apparently you think this was a bad thing? Losing touch with people is natural. Having to explicitly sever a relationship is awkward. But without a natural pruning function, it's easy to end up with a thousand shallow relationships and not enough deep ones.

_red 8y ago
Imagine the guy that sat next to you in freshmen algebra class. Now imagine still having him on your 'friends list' 20 years later... People are being hyper-socialized. Its not normal and no doubt causes people increased mental stress.

Zelphyr 8y ago

> Before Facebook, if I lost someone's contact information, and drifted outside of their social circle for a long enough time, chances were I would never ever see or speak to that person again. Not really. Chances are, I knew someone who knew that person and could ask them for the contact information. Before Facebook, how do you think people coordinated class reunions decades after graduation, decades after having spoken with most of the people in their class? Sure, it's easier now, but it wasn't as difficult as you make it out to be. > Before Facebook, if people wanted to organize conversation and cooperation on an information technology platform, the options were to pay $X00-$X000 for a proprietary system, get lucky enough to know about mailing lists, have someone who knew sysadmin do it basically for free, or have everyone learn how to use something like IRC. Again, it really wasn't that hard. You found where the groups you wanted to hang out with were online. It wasn't restricted to mailing lists or IRC. There were forums, etc... And no, you never needed to know a sysadmin to do any of that. That's just silly. > Social networking was an enormous pain in the ass. No it wasn't. You talked to people through the channels you had available to you or, even better, in person! All Facebook, and social media in general, has done is centralize all of that. I'd argue we're now seeing that such centralization isn't a good thing. You're right that the problem isn't necessarily Facebook's fault, it's how people are using it and we're just not good at using it. However, I counter that Facebook knows this and is taking full advantage of it for their own benefit. They're purposely showing things to people that they know will get them riled up so they will comment and spend more time on the site. That's just unethical. It will not get better as long as current management and thinking is leading Facebook.

lorinm 8y ago

>Before Facebook, if I lost someone's contact information, and drifted outside of their social circle for a long enough time, chances were I would never ever see or speak to that person again. And chances are you are never going to speak to that person again even if you are friends on facebook. The only thing that facebook invented is how to increase user engagement by finding loopholes in our psychology and get us addicted to their products. Facebook did not invent anything other than making this world more chaotic.

vertexFarm 8y ago

Eeeehhh I don't think that's as guaranteed as you make it out to be. Surviving technologies had a honeymoon phase, a disillusionment, and then they even out into a plateau. Not all technologies are guaranteed to survive forever and end up like this though, there are many examples of things that just plain weren't worth it once the true costs were revealed. It's fine to lose touch with people. Some people are meant to drift away as you move forward in life, you can't have everything all the time. Those people still drift away even with facebook, you just have this illusion that they're still in your life. Often you have to watch their bizarre posts as they get old and go nuts. Or some arbitrary algo hides them from you anyway, and you forget they are even in your friends list. This is just me, but I think I'd rather have the fuzzy memories of some high school friend and the closure; the certainty of knowing that chapter of life is done. If both of us can't be bothered to put forth the minimum required effort to keep in touch, so be it. Is it really of any value to have a purely symbolic attachment to this person forever? Look through your full friends list and contemplate this for a while. It's not certain yet, but the social cost of facebook could potentially be enormous and damaging. In the end will it really prove worthwhile? Should we put up with the "real marriage" after the honeymoon? If it's a sufficiently rocky marriage--if it's a one-sided and abusive relationship--the rational thing to do is not to hold tight, ignore it and ride it out. The right thing to do is plan for divorce. I think this is yet to be determined, but I'm starting to lean towards the opinion that near-exclusively digital socialization was a mistake.

inkaudio 8y ago

This was the path all viable social networks were heading, than Facebook bought those willing to sell, Instagram & WhatsApp. So no, the problem is Facebook, in particular Facebook method of operation. Things would have been better if Instagram & WhatsApp did not sell to them or it was blocked by regulators. These companies would be serious competitors that operated differently.