[kalleboo]

I also remember when Facebook originally added their algorithmic timeline.

At the time everyone was complaining that Facebook was just "people posting their lunches" and from that PoV I thought it was a great addition to promote the things people found important in their lives instead of the noise.

Of course that didn't last long.

[dbspin]

I was in college at the time, and the wall went from incredible social affordance to spambait advertising platform essentially overnight. It's likely that the 'people posting their lunches' weren't leveraging the platform to its best utility. Either way the change literally made the kind of passive socialising use I've described above impossible. No replacement has emerged in the years since, which really surprises me. Since location aware social networks existed in the mid-2000s, which is now, checks notes - twenty years ago.