I think early FB (maybe ~2007 iirc) was fine. You posted status updates, photos, and browsed your feed in chronological order with no silly prioritising of diff

I think early FB (maybe ~2007 iirc) was fine. You posted status updates, photos, and browsed your feed in chronological order with no silly prioritising of different posts or stuffing ads and videos between them. The ads were unobtrusive vertical banner ads on the rhs I think and I don’t recall them being targeted. At the end of the day every tech platform that’s free needs to make money somehow and I don’t see how we escape a race to the bottom unless users pay some fee to avoid it. Unfortunately. And we’ve now gone way beyond just “pay a fee and everything will be fine” because FB et al are now huge data brokers, they have lobbyists, they have morphed so much that changing the model wouldn’t fix it (imo). Maybe a new set of less evil startups can gain traction in a paid model but I don’t know how..