[cruffle_duffle]

> The most crucial damage had already happened — people gave up on trust that Facebook could handle their data responsibly, and trust that they’d have a good experience on the site.

I think it was also that people were beginning to see the consequences of “over sharing” with people you’d never normally share things with. The vision of connecting everybody sounds great but not everybody needs, wants or even should hear everything everybody else says. And once such a realization comes about, away goes the linear timeline and in comes a more algorithmic approach. Suddenly your own posts get algorithmiclly ranked, sorted and filtered by every person on your friends list. And to get your post to show up on their feed you have to please an algorithm first in order to get permission. Thus comes a whole host of negative social interaction and toxicity.

I dunno. Maybe the decline of things like Facebook are simply because society “figured out through lived experience” what the end game of a tool like facebook looks like.

[ninth_ant]

You’re right about how this decline happened.

But encouraging people to share to the widest audience was another aspect where short-term growth of metrics was prioritized over long-term health of the platform.

There was a possible future where FB leadership didn’t get worried about/envious of Twitter and push so hard on public sharing. But that type of call was solidly on Zuck and not Sandberg.

[disgruntledphd2]

To be fair to Sheryl Sandberg, she kept telling them that posting to everyone was a terrible idea but Zuckerberg and Cox didn't listen.

[ninth_ant]

I'm not aware of that personally, but I believe it. The revisionist history trying to paint Zuckerberg as being manipulated here is so just insulting to reality. Zuck deserves the credit for both driving the decisions between both the successes and the failures that arose here.

[disgruntledphd2]

She mentioned it in a performance session that was recorded before I joined FB (I joined in 2013, I believe the talk was from 2011).

I completely agreed with her, but after watching the talk came to the conclusion that if she couldn't change it, then I certainly wouldn't.

More generally, younger people tend to be OK with everyone knowing everything, while as you get older you want to share with smaller circles to avoid conflict. Sheryl was quite a bit older than Mark and Chris at the time, which may have been the difference.