I think here's the argument underpinning all of these.

Assumption: Facebook is more effective at capturing attention than TV, TV was more effective than radio, radio was more effective than newspaper.

Follows: If this process continues, at some point we will develop something which captures attention as perfectly as possible.

Opinion: That hypothetical end case is most certainly a social ill, especially for democracies.

So whether it's Facebook, or whether it's the thing after Facebook, if we keep stepping down this path we're eventually going to end up somewhere very dark.

> Facebook's innovation was trapping users in a walled garden with omnipresent surveillance and advertising

That isn't an innovation. They're AOL 2.0.

Even if you don’t think the product itself is novel, the technology infrastructure behind Facebook is absolutely novel, from the news feed to TAO, their massive graph database. I’d wager to say TAO is the highest throughout OLTP database in the world. They were able to get ahead of MySpace, the market leader, because their technology was vastly more nimble and reliable.

>a walled garden with omnipresent surveillance and advertising

So... a shopping mall? A school? Any corporate job? A walk through downtown? "In-network" minutes and long distance charges on your phone? Religious institutions?

Whatever Facebook is doing wrong for society, they are standing on the backs of giants. Walled garden or not, surveillance or not, advertising or not, people have never been as free to socialize as they are today. If there is something negative on your Facebook feed, you are solely responsible for it being there. It takes two clicks to make it go away forever.

> If there is something negative on your Facebook feed, you are solely responsible for it being there. It takes two clicks to make it go away forever.

What do I click on to make the stuff Facebook decided I shouldn't see show up?

That's a very different problem in a very different league of problems. Where do you click to see the stuff the New York Times decided not to show you? Or scenes a movie editor left on the cutting room floor? Or pages an author never sent to print? Or words I left untyped in this comment?

Content editors and curators have existed for a long time.

But they weren't automated and couldn't tailor the content for each user individually to maximize the time they spend looking at ads.

There used to be Facebook lists (NOT groups, lists are a private sorting friends can’t see). I would make a list of friends I most want to follow and open just that list. But that feature seems gone (I also used list to limit friends visibility and access to my wall... honestly google plus has this right)

Facebook still has lists. It's a little convoluted and only really works well from a desktop/laptop browser, but they're there.

I had a list I really liked that just disappeared recently. I think he's right that they removed the feature.

Yikes, you don't know anything about how this works do you?