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I miss the old days when Facebook was simply a fun way to reconnect with friend and family who lived far away. Unfortunately, those days are gone. It feels like
by coef2 1y ago
I miss the old days when Facebook was simply a fun way to reconnect with friend and family who lived far away. Unfortunately, those days are gone. It feels like an over engineered attention-hogging system that collects a large amount of data and risks people's mental health along the way.
- droopyEyelids 1y agoThis is a real Rip Van Winkle style take (posted with gentle humor)
- msgodel 1y agoFrom the very beginning Facebook has been an AI wearing your friends as a skinsuit. People are only just starting to notice now.
- d_watt 1y agoPerhaps naive to say, but I think there was the briefest moment where your status updates started with "is", feeds were chronological, and photos and links weren't pushed over text, that it was not an adversarial actor to one's wellbeing.
- mysterydip 1y agoWell they had to grow the userbase before they could abuse it :)
- emseetech 1y agoThe early, organic days of social networking are always fun. They never would have pulled in billions of users if they started off how they are now.
- cornfieldlabs 1y agoCouldn't have said it better. Nothing is a social network anymore. Everything is a content-consumer a platform now. People just want to scroll and scroll
- kbrkbr 1y agoPeople want to scroll and scroll, because social media make them miserable [1, 2, 3] Perfect storm. [1] https://time.com/4882372/social-media-facebook-instagram-unhappy/ https://time.com/4882372/social-media-facebook-instagram-unh... [2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-social-media-makes-people-unhappy-and-simple-ways-to-fix-it/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-social-media-... [3] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/navigating-the-maze/202506/why-social-media-makes-you-feel-worse https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/navigating-the-maze/...
- 7952 1y agoMy hunch is that instant messaging is slowly taking over that space. If you actually want to connect with people you can without needing much of a platform.
- smeej 1y agoThere was an even briefer moment where there was no such thing as status updates. You didn't have a "wall." The point wasn't to post about your own life. You could go leave public messages on other people's profiles. And you could poke them. And that was about it. I remember complaining like hell when the wall came out, that it was the beginning of the end. But this was before publicly recording your own thoughts somewhere everyone could see was commonplace, so I did it by messaging my friends on AIM. And then when the Feed came out? It was received as creepy and stalkerish. And there are now (young) adults born in the time since who can't even fathom a world without ubiquitous feeds in your pocket. Call me nostalgic, but we were saner then.
- figassis 1y agoOh wow, I’d even forgotten about pokes. Thanks for that trip down memory lane.
- smeej 1y agoI made the mistake of sending a Gen Z (adult) friend a poking finger emoji to try to remind him about something. It wasn't the first time I've had a generational digital (ha) communication failure, but it was the first time I've had one because I'm old and out of touch with what things mean these days!
- alexthehurst 1y agoStill a supported feature! You can find it if you dig around in the menus long enough.
- fivestones 1y agoUnless I’m remembering wrong, posting a public message on someone else’s profile was posting on their wall. Or was it called something else before it was somebody’s wall?
- smeej 1y agoIt didn't have a name. It wasn't really a "feature." You just went and posted on their "page" I guess I would call it. The change to being able to post things on your own page and expecting other people to come to your page and read them (because, again, no Feed) wasn't received well at first. Keep in mind, smartphones didn't exist yet, and the first ones didn't have selfie cameras even once they did. And the cameras on flip phones were mostly garbage, so if you wanted to show a picture, you had to bring a camera with you, plug it in, and upload it. So at first the Wall basically replaced AIM away messages so you could tell your friends which library you were going to go study in and how long. And this didn't seem problematic, because you were probably only friends with people in your school (it was only open to university students, and not many schools at first), and nobody was mining your data, because there were no business or entity pages. Simpler, simpler days.
- lern_too_spel 1y agoThey were stealing your contacts from wherever they could get them. There was never a time when they didn't abuse their users.
- safety1st 1y agoI mean let's be clear on the history and not romanticize anything, Zuck created Facebook pretty much so he could spy on college girls. He denies this of course, but it all started with his Facemash site for ranking the girls, and then we get to the early Facebook era and there's his quote about the "4,000 dumbfucks trusting him with their photos" etc. There is no benevolent original version of FB. It was a toy made by a college nerd who wanted to siphon data about chicks. It was more user friendly back then because he didn't have a monopoly yet. Now it has expanded to siphoning data from the entire human race and because they're powerful they can be bigger bullies about it. Zuck has kind of indirectly apologized for being a creeper during his college years. But the behavior of his company hasn't changed.
- distances 1y agoVery true! I was annoyed by the loss of the "is" pattern and basically stopped using Facebook when the chronological feed was removed.
- labster 1y agoNah, not from the very beginning. Before the News Feed, The Facebook was great to find people and keep in contact. Following someone’s page too often was called Facebook stalking and was socially discouraged. Unfortunately parasocial behavior is good for engagement.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- rafaelmn 1y agoThey didn't even have algorithmic feeds from beginning, so no.
- nixpulvis 1y agoThere was a sweet spot right after the first big redesign and before the wall feed changed where things felt good. I was in high school still too, and lived in another state during the summer, so even if I didn't use it A LOT, it still really helped me keep up with some of my friends. Interestingly though, my best friends basically never posted anything.
- arizen 1y agoThis is a perfect illustration of misaligned AI. The AI is given a proxy goal- 'maximize engagement'- which it achieves perfectly. The user's goal - 'foster genuine connection' - is completely secondary. The AI isn't malicious, it's just ruthlessly effective at optimizing for the wrong thing.
- blibble 1y agoI don't think it's AI the problem with meta is three fold: 1. zuckerberg is completely misaligned 2. facebook has hundreds of billions dollars of resources 3. zuckerberg has total control of facebook normally a company with this level of resources would not be under the total control of a single individual other shareholders would have pushed back on the obviously bad ideas of "metaverse" and "training AI on private photos of children" but with facebook: misaligned zuckerberg is in total control, and no-one can stop him so the rest of the world has to suffer whatever this amoral asshole wants to inflict upon them this month now add AI into this, and zuckerberg can inflict even more damage onto society with fewer and fewer people to get in his way (the same applies to Google and Musk's empire too)
- IshKebab 1y agoWhat delusional nonsense. What AI was Facebook using in 2005?
- npalli 1y agoSo Feb 4, 2004 (founding) to September 6, 2006 (newsfeed). LOL.
- cornfieldlabs 1y agoI am building one with a chronological feed and no public profiles. You need to already know someone to find them here. Check out the waitlist! https://waitlist-tx.pages.dev/ https://waitlist-tx.pages.dev/ Edit: Here are some rough layout designs https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1uLwnXDdUsC9hMZBa1ysRwINNvlv8LH__ https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1uLwnXDdUsC9hMZBa1ysR... It's intentionally simple
- pulkitanand 1y agoYour landing page talks about all the right goals. postx is a good placeholder name, I recommend ideating a better name for launch. looking forward, wish you the best.
- cornfieldlabs 1y agoThank you Anand - for the encouragement and joining the waitlist! It means really a lot to us. We are working on a better name and the site! I'll send you the welcome email manually soon!
- cornfieldlabs 1y agonew users will face the empty feed problem since by design one can't find anyone without their code. No "People you may know" or "select at least N interests or follow N accounts to continue". I think early adopters will invite their friends to join and that is the only way. Got any suggestions?
- vishalontheline 1y agoShow 3 walls side by side: updates by friends, interactions by direct connections on shares by friends of friends, and public stories by those nearby (geographically). The latter could also turn into a way for local businesses to promote themselves. Keep the 3 in separate lanes in order to let the user decide how much they want to doom scroll.
- 1y ago
- xyst 1y agoThese days I treat Facebook as a marketplace for offloading lightly used items. Social media is dead to me.
- cornfieldlabs 1y agoFacebook marketplace has surprisingly large number of listings and in my country not even dedicated marketplaces can come close
- mrweasel 1y agoFacebook marketplace killed or vastly reduced the size of other marketplace platforms in many countries. Strangely it also seems like the amount of fraud rose as people moved to Facebook Marketplace. I guess it was easier for scammers to work on Facebook, needing only one platform to commit fraud in multiple countries, rather than attempting to work on hundreds of local sites.
- idiotsecant 1y agoWhat a coincidence, I use it as a market for buying lightly used items.
- danielbln 1y ago> Social media is dead to me You know, HN is social media.
- prmoustache 1y agoActually I don't think there is a single definition of social media but some countries/juridictions created their own for legal purposes and for most of them hn would not be considered a social media for various reasons: - no discovery of users - no subscription of users content - no private/direct messages
- robocat 1y agoProvide wildly different features: get everybody hooked on a different feature. That's the trick with these social systems. They don't care about the features each person dislikes or doesn't use.
- DSingularity 1y agoRisks people’s mental health? I would say it is pretty obvious that FB and IG are bad for people. Some may have a natural mental fortitude and can survive it without instruction but for the rest of us we need some instructions on how to use these platforms without compromising key aspects of our mental health.
- absurdo 1y agoI’d like to see a proper study on this that can be replicated before I jump on this train. And I’m a supporter of Jonathan “the kids are not alright” Haidt but let’s not kid ourselves his work is questionable throughout. It’s easy to dogpile. I’d like to see more proof, that’s all. “It’s obvious” doesn’t cut it for me. For one, we have major societal problems that are being exposed through these platforms, and the mere knowledge of the problem has a negative impact on the individual. Do we shut the platform down because it’s showing us things we don’t want to see, or do we fix the societal problem? And many others.
- Llamamoe 1y agoPop some terms into Google scholar and you'll find study after study after study both correlating social media use with worse mental health and demonstrating improvements from reducing use, in children and adults both. It varies by demographic, but yeah, social media are pretty universally awful for humans, and that's not just conjecture.
- robocat 1y ago> correlating That's the issue, and it is what you attempted to answer. Causation is much harder to tease out from the noise.
- suzzer99 1y agoI have Fluff-Busting Purity, I'm part of a bunch of Facebook groups, and I only browse on my laptop. I pretty much only see what I want to.
- wkat4242 1y agoYeah the one difference with some other enshittified things is that I really have the impression that Facebook was always meant to go this way. It was also one of the first to drop genuine user-sercing features like the old timeline (just all the posts of people you followed which you came there to see) which it replaced with the algorithmic feed which recommended stuff you never asked for or wanted. Instagram did keep that feature though until 2 years and still has it although it's constantly switching it off.
- figassis 1y agoWould a friends and staying in touch social network even succeed today?
- cornfieldlabs 1y agoI am trying to find out with the one I am building :) I wonder how many people can give up effortless doomscrolling to see a limited length chronological feed made up of their friends' posts
- neepi 1y agoRead Careless People. It was never about that.
- oulipo 1y agoWhat I don't understand is how come they could make such a crappy product, almost everything is totally unusable both on the web and the app, it's pathetic to be a Meta engineer at that point
- ulfw 1y agomyspace back in the day was a creative open canvas. You could put whatever random stuff on an HTML page and that was "you". Super unstructured, wild. Whatever. Facebook came out and was a whole different thing. Facebook is a "database with a web (and later mobile app) frontend". It's all about data mining. Always has, always will be.
- arrowsmith 1y agoWho even uses Facebook anymore? I don't know anyone who posts to their own profile anymore, and I'm part of the generation where literally everybody was posting every detail of their lives to FB as students. For "seeing what old friends are up to", that's entirely shifted to IG. (Yes, pedants, I know that this is an FB product.) The only time I ever open FB nowadays is for the marketplace, and when I do, all I see in the feed is garbage brainrot from big slop accounts.
- n1b0m 1y agoDon’t forget supercharging the spread of hate such as the harmful anti-Rohingya content in Myanmar
- guicen 1y agoI have similar feelings. In the early days, Facebook was more like a cozy corner of the Internet, where you could see the latest news from your high school classmates and the dinner photos posted by distant relatives. It was very relaxing. Now when I open the app, I feel like I am being manipulated by the algorithm, constantly pushing you to click and watch things, and I can't stop. It has become smarter, but also more indifferent.
- throwaway83094 1y agoRose-tinted glasses. Here's what Mark Zuckerberg had to say about his own platform in 2004: > Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard > Zuck: Just ask. > Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS > [Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one? > Zuck: People just submitted it. > Zuck: I don't know why. > Zuck: They "trust me" > Zuck: Dumb fucks
- imhoguy 1y agoFrom early days of FB I remember it nagged to read all my addressbook/contacts. It was always data hungry. It wouldn't grow so quickly and big without gray ethics.