The engaging part of the wall to wall wasn't how good it was for communication, it was the semi-permissioned town hall style chat for semi-related groups of friends you'd see as it whizzed by on your feed. People did all sorts of humblebragging, cries for attention, or on the nicer side of the spectrum, open discussion that chat like whatsapp and messenger do not have.

The similarity between snooping around facebook and seeing all the open chats going on with people you'd never usually talk to and watching reality TV were striking to me.

Thought admittedly, I do not know if it was one of the driving factors to FB success or not, so it may well have been past its use by date rather than the news feeds killing it.

Personally I enjoyed those days more as my feed was more of a chronological account of people chatting rather than reshares articles, videos and memes.

On the other hand, your description bears a strong resemblance to Twitter. If you have a conversation with someone through replies, anyone who follows both of you will see it in their timeline, and by default, anyone can read it by going to either of your profiles. So it’s not uncommon to have someone you’ve never heard of jump into a conversation. And it’s easy enough to “snoop around” yourself; sometimes that can be a source of genuine new acquaintances, and with time, friendships. (There’s an etiquette to it, though. If you don’t know someone, you should only butt in to their conversations if you have something to add - not because, say, you disagree with a political statement they’re making, or at the very least, certainly not if you’re planning to hurl insults!)

Unfortunately, some people and some topics tend to attract a lot of those sorts of uninvited rebuttals - in other words, harassment - driving some to make their accounts private. In that case, only approved followers can see your tweets, ever. There’s no “friends of friends”-like middle ground, or any other more flexible filtering options.

On the other hand, for most people, Twitter’s system seems to work pretty well. It works for me, and I really enjoy the spontaneity of it.

Facebook never clicked for me. I've had an account for a long time, but log in maybe once or twice a year.

But Instagram I love. I check it a couple of times a week. I love seeing images from my friends and having comments barely visible is exactly what I like. My only problem with it is the increasing frequency of ads. It's sucking a lot of the joy out of the platform for me.

> The wall was never a good way to do this.

And yet people used it--even after the news feed and well into the reign of IM and email. I'm not sure how it's smart to remove a feature that was creating engagement just because FB didn't understand why.