[drnick1]

> rarely had people's real names & photos on it

This is a feature, not a bug. There is nothing worse for a society's collective privacy than a surveillance machine where people willingly post every detail of their lives. Stalin would have dreamed of today's anti-social media as a surveillance tool.

> There's so much that's great about it.

There is also so much that's truly awful about it, such as Meta vacuuming up your contact list, photos, and recording extensive telemetry. And that's assuming messages are truly encrypted and not analyzed behind your back by Meta. E2EE is kind of meaningless when the endpoints cannot be trusted. SMS is insecure in transit but it isn't controlled by a single for-profit company with close ties to government agencies.

[IshKebab]

> This is a feature, not a bug.

Uhm no. I wanted to know who real people were. At the time it was the much more secure and private than anything else because you needed to be at the same university to see anyone's accounts, and the idea of selling user data for profit didn't even exist.

> There is also so much that's truly awful about it, such as Meta vacuuming up your contact list, photos, and recording extensive telemetry

Sure. That doesn't invalidate any of the good stuff, and is minor in comparison (contact lists are not as valuable as you seem to think). If Signal had existed at the time I'm sure it would have been extremely popular too. Also photos are E2E encrypted.

[UqWBcuFx6NV4r]

okay? good for you? you being worked up about privacy doesn’t magically invalidate the experience of others. you not liking something doesn’t mean that it’s objectively bad. you not seeing utility in something doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have utility. you not seeing value in something doesn’t mean that a great many people saw value in it, which is exactly what you’re arguing against. It does not surprise me that someone with a worldview so simple and self-centred cannot comprehend of how a great many people saw the juice being worth the squeeze. Facebook had immense utility in the 2000s and even some of the 2010s. Not everyone wants to hang out with you on 4chan dude.

[freehorse]

And a lot of people also didn’t see the utility and the invasion of the privacy. It is not only OP or needs or 4chan, if that’s your only argument.