Reading this fascinating thread makes me finally understand why I left Facebook as a platform - and that's because Facebook ISN'T a platform. Zuckerberg thinks

Reading this fascinating thread makes me finally understand why I left Facebook as a platform - and that's because Facebook ISN'T a platform. Zuckerberg thinks of Facebook in terms of technology - it's an application platform with certain features like messaging, a news feed, an API and so forth. That isn't what Facebook was to me. In the beginning, Facebook was a community. As An Application, the problem it solved, that of staying in sync with your community, had many other solutions: Meeting IRL, talking on the phone, going to reunions, and so forth. Facebook was just a convenient virtual place to put those conversations and meetings instead. It felt neat, it felt good to have your community in a digital space. The reason I left has nothing to do with the features. Facebook is a perfectly FINE application. I cannot point to a single technological flaw with it. The flaw is in the community. Every year since 2016, I have felt that much of the communities that I interacted with are no longer relevant to me, and somehow the old ways of finding community : Reunions, talking on the phone, meeting IRL for events - just feels like a better community somehow. I am sure Zuck and Team over at Facebook will continue to add new and amazing features to Facebook that make it a better and better platform, application and API every day. But I don't think I will ever go back, because the community that I found and loved there in 2011 died in 2016, and I cannot imagine it ever coming back. When I go online and see some of the ways in which friends have changed - I just cannot imagine wanting to be close to them again. I have a criticism of Zuckerberg which may seem unfair, but it is what it is. Zuckerberg is very intelligent, and he's a technologist. But he's not a community organizer. He isn't someone who inspires people to come together; he's not a "bringer" as an organizer might say. I don't think Facebook needs more technology. It needs reconciliation and healing of deep and painful divides that were formed over the past decade that mirror a tear in the fabric of our very society - the deep and brewing divisions in values in western society are NOT going to be papered over by an algorithm. If anything, profit maximizing algorithms that create cliques and insular societies that only see what they want to see make the problem WORSE. Facebook needs a Martin Luther King Jr, not a Thomas Edison or Steve Jobs. This description by Zuck of Messenger and News Feed in technological terms only reinforces by opinion that I'm never going back.