Facebook is one vision of ~modern life. Social networks are massively overrated in term of human value IMO. I think whatsapp is probably closer to what would be useful and not toxic. I don't believe people need profiles and graphs and whatever.
The profiles and graphs are really for advertisers, aren’t they? It seems like this discussion is centering on the utility that Facebook’s consumer products provide for it members. As we are often reminded, due to their business model, interests of users are indirect, secondary. Facebook’s main service is of course for advertisers.
I just came back from an island, we barely used computers. Never been so happy. People use whatsapp a lot, but it's just a modern reincarnation of phones. Send a little text, a little voice message, a little video. Nothing more. There it seems it's just right fulfilling the need to chat. The rest was a fantasy.
Sort of. Facebook has left a market wide open, their original one. At the start when people started to use Facebook it was mostly young people sharing more intimate pictures and stories with their friends and people of similar age and mindset.
Now facebook is your public profile, where your aunt, parents and employer can see everything you do and judge every post you make. That's why we have nice pictures of cityscapes, nature, holidays and of food on our profiles. Because anything intimate or controversial would be exposed to a too big audience for comfort.
So the market for smaller circles of "parent free zones" is wide open. I personally believe that's one of the reason Instagram got traction, your parents and employer weren't there in the start but your friends were. Just look at Tumbler.
The service Facebook provides through their website is awful. I have no reason to use it, and have tried repeatedly only to be beaten back by their incompetence and even apparent malice. So maybe their graph is the best, but what are they really doing with it?
Facebook jumped the shark when they started trying to encourage private individuals to “create engagement” and pay to boost their posts. If internal marketing jargon is leaking into your UX, you clearly have serious problems with how your staff are being incentivised.
Facebook could have become an engine that allowed society to maximise human capital and but they sacrificed all that potential at the altar of growth hacking and bleeding advertisers dry.
I remember when that first came out, and was based on how many friends you had. It would have cost me $90 to promote my vacation photos to a group of people semi-randomly selected by Facebook and chance from my friends list, and for people with more ‘friends’, they wanted up to $500, if I recall.
Socially, it is extremely out of touch to even offer such a service to individuals.