[asimpletune]

I don’t remember what Facebook had instead of a news feed in 2008, but I do remember thinking Facebook was so cool then. When messenger came out, it was amazing. It was totally normal then to message random people who you thought were cool and just have a conversation. I would even get random chats from Facebook employees. It just seemed so different then than now.

I’m just trying to piece together the evolution of Facebook, feeds, and then when I stopped caring. Like, I don’t think the feed was always like this. At one point there was nothing, sure, but there was also at one point a reverse chronically sorted log of what your friends were doing I think? That was the best. By the time my parents were on I think there was a few years of overlap before I just forgot about it.

[wodenokoto]

They had the news feed back then too, although it looked very differently. The two major differences between fb and myspace was the forced layout and that you didn't have to browse the site to see if there were updates on friends walls.

The major difference is what people are posting, and how tangentially related to your network, the posts on your newsfeed are.

Back then celebrities and news media weren't part of the platform, so you didn't really have these major intersections in the graph. I also believe that you had to re-share in order to push a post into a node that isn't directly connected to the posts author. Today a like is enough.

The reason why facebook is uncool now, is a mix between who the active users are, and how much room and focus facebook puts on links to newssite and posts by people who aren't your friends.

[pxlpshr]

This is exactly how I feel as an end-user over the same time period to the point that I don't even login anymore except for work. It's exhausting and it's no longer about the projected vision of "connecting people", it's about connecting people to content and other monetizable assets as a first-order priority in everything they do and touch.

This is why Facebook/IG is unrecoverable to me as a destination for connecting with the people I care about. Instead, it's become iMessage and I'm quite happy about that. No ads and the conversations/photos are a lot more authentic compared with social media.

I still love social media as a form (I think), it's just become more media and less social.

[Zak]

According to Wikipedia, Facebook had a news feed in 2008; it was added in 2006, before which it was necessary to view a user's profile to see their posts. The switch to an algorithmically generated, rather than chronological feed started in 2011.

Facebook's decline, for me was not due to the feed being algorithmic. I think it got better around that time; showing original content from people I like to interact with first is a positive experience. What's not positive is showing me most things other than original content from my friends.

I'm not sure why the change happened, but at some point it did. Most of what I see posted on Facebook now is not original content from my friends. I mostly don't want to see third-party content. The share button was there long before I noticed this trend, but people are using it a lot more. I just went and cataloged 50 algorithmically-chosen posts. Here's the distribution:

Shared third-party post or link: 24

Original text: 9

Original image: 9

Directly-posted image of third-party content: 3

Promotion of a physical product by a page I follow: 2

Promotion of media by a page I follow: 2

Promoting own event: 1

[xg15]

I have the strong suspicion that Facebook often decides first that it wants to show me some post, then does some graph-walking and invents a "reason" after the fact why that post was somehow related to my friends list.

At least that would explain why a video that some friend of a friend watched 3 days ago is suddenly at the top of my newsfeed.

[Zak]

I repeated the count with a chronological feed, which is possible to get in a desktop browser with facebook.com/?sk=h_chr

Shared third-party content: 16

Original text: 5

Promoting own event: 4

Original image/video: 11

Directly-posted image of third-party content: 0

Page promoting product: 1

Page promoting media: 5

Group activity: 8

What would really make Facebook better for me is an algorithm that prefers original content. It might not be enough if that was something I could enable myself because what gets interaction from others affects what people post.

[sdrinf]

For the record, the turning point was 2016, when basically every single sleeper cell “friend” was activated by mass agitprop, leading to a frenzy of political activity, and in the process suffocating everything else valuable of human attention.

[tunesmith]

Yeah, and you could see it coming. I remember joking pre-2016 about the upcoming election, wondering how many of my friends would start unfriending each other. I had no idea how big a change was actually coming.

I wonder why it didn't happen in 2012. I remember ACA arguments on Facebook but while they were contentious, they were generally value-driven and not based off of batshit lies.

[Macha]

Politicians are generally an older crowd. Obama got a lot of credit in 2008 for twitter use, wherein that use was basically tweeting campaign statements and updates.

It was probably 2016 by the time that politicians realised they could use social media to whip up such strong feelings to maybe benefit their campaigns.

People certainly disagreed with each other online in 2012 (I remember reddit had subreddits dedicated to complaining about how much pro Ron Paul content was posted in the mainstream subreddits), but I think it's the active engagement of the politicians themselves that turbo charged this.

[saghm]

> I wonder why it didn't happen in 2012. I remember ACA arguments on Facebook but while they were contentious, they were generally value-driven and not based off of batshit lies

Both candidates in 2012 went out of their way to maintain civility to each other publicly. I think when a candidate treats their opponent with respect, the followers tend to follow mostly in suit, but if they don't, it kind of just opens the floodgates, and once that happens, there's no going back.

[RNCTX]

> Both candidates in 2012 went out of their way to maintain civility to each other publicly.

When George W. Bush was running for governor of Texas against Ann Richards in the late 90s (before anyone but us was on the internet), Karl Rove distributed printed pamphlets, particularly in churches in East Texas among evangelicals, talking about her secret lesbian lover. She's not a lesbian.

And of course when Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 she invented (or paid someone else to invent, more accurately) this ridiculous Russian conspiracy narrative that persists because press outlets affiliated with her party continue to amplify it.

In 2000, the aforementioned GW Bush's party had the chief justice of the SCOTUS (who incidentally got that job despite living in an AZ neighborhood back in the 60s deed restricted to whites only and organizing a sort of election day mob that would physically confront non-white voters standing in line to vote) stop counting ballots to ensure that Bush won.

Before Reagan appointed Rehnquist chief justice, when he was campaigning against Carter in 1979/80, he was giving speeches at notorious lynching sites around the former confederate states and talking about the "oppression of the IRS" (this was shortly after the IRS had stripped Bob Jones University of its non-profit status during Carter's tenure for refusing to admit black students).

Civility is anomaly, not the trend.

I'm all for criticizing Facebook for what Facebook does wrong but it's just a mirror, it doesn't have any original content on it. The same can be said of political candidates. If their message lacks resonance with what would-be voters believe already, no one will repeat it.

[nowherebeen]

Before I deleted Facebook, I remember specifically around 2014-15 was when things started to change significantly on newsfeeds. It was less about keeping up with friends and more about advertisements.

[tomjen3]

Maybe we were just younger and had friends who did cooler things?

[fullshark]

Definitely part of it, also we were more naive and willing to share more of our lives online. It’s why youth social networks seem alive and others seem to be decaying.

[Damogran6]

The younger cooler people aren't on Facebook

[jfengel]

I shudder to think about a system where random people could message me.

On Quora, I just turned off that feature. Almost every single message I got was "hi", from somebody who was trying to either sell me crypto or catfish me.

Maybe there's a period when a new open messaging system opens you up to just fun new people, but when it grows, spammers and scammers will follow. Glad you enjoyed Facebook before everybody got to enjoy Facebook, but most people never saw it like that.

[PragmaticPulp]

> I shudder to think about a system where random people could message me.

Do you not have a phone number that anyone can call? Or an e-mail address that anyone can send to? Or have you used a platform like IRC that allows users anyone to send you direct messages?

> Glad you enjoyed Facebook before everybody got to enjoy Facebook, but most people never saw it like that

Facebook messenger isn't overrun by spammers. I've only used the messenger a handful of times but IIRC it wasn't hard to tell the difference between messages from friends and requests from people I wasn't friends with.

Spam detection also isn't terribly difficult at scale. Spammers need to message thousands or more accounts to even have a chance at converting someone, which is so far away from the normal use patterns of a real user that it's easy to flag.

[jfengel]

Yeah, I have a phone number, and I don't pick it up if I don't recognize it. I don't know you, I probably don't want random communication from you.

I am pleased with the state of spam detection for things that implement it. Google does a good job, both on my phone (Pixel) and my email. Quora does not, and I resent it; it makes the site worse, so I turned it off.

If Facebook were letting strangers talk to me, I'd probably stop using it.

[Nextgrid]

You just need a high enough barrier to entry or real consequences to deter malicious behavior. Spam & scams work because there's no downside; if they had to pay a fee to open an account every time they get banned for spam they'll move on very quickly.

[arthurcolle]

Spammers took over!