There were like 20 years in between what you describe and Facebook's dominance.
Before Facebook there were thousands of thriving independent forums on wide varieties of topics. I spent large portions of my teenage years on them and got way more value out of them than I have out of any Facebook group.
Facebook democratized social networking.
At that time I don't recall the social networks being about your local community, friends and family like Facebook is today. It was about people you would never have met - because that's what made the Internet magical at the time. It could easily have morphed into forums of friends and family - not that it would have rivaled Facebook but it could have met the need.
Socially speaking, I think the Internet is much less interesting now than it was 20 years ago.
They solve different problems. Usenet of my youth provided way more value, both social and otherwise, to me than Facebook ever will. However Usenet would never have let me serendipitously reconnect with the good friend from high school I hadn't spoken to for over 10 years.
Facebook has the advantage of being a passive social network. If I stopped posting to Usenet (or twitter) for a month I essentially disappeared. With Facebook I don't have to do anything, people can still just as easily find and contact me if they want to.
Social networking was NOT an enormous pain in the ass. Everybody had, and still has email - it was the gateway to the internet. Roughly since the beginning of the internet. And all the people that joined. Email got used in almost all of the ways that Facebook did.
In addition to email, there were ways to do "roughly" everything Facebook did with varying levels of difficulty - some roughly unobtainium for the "later billions" of people that Facebook drew - not just email based listservs, but USENET before that, self hostedweb forums starting in the 90's, Craigslist in the commercial space.
The problem IS Facebook (and in a different but related way, Google).
UNlike Craigslist (for example), Facebook is a public company. But it is not accountable to the public, as we've seen over and over again. It's users are a commodity and are not stakeholders in any meaningful way. But - even the shareholders are not. Zuck owns AND controls it almost entirely. And unlike Craig Newmark (who isn't perfect), Zuck appears to have been deeply flawed from the very beginning, and the poison of unearthly money and power have only made it worse.
providers came and went and custom domains for emails were extremely rare... at least in my circles
Not at all. On the consumer level they were typically associated with your ISP account. So you'd get to be <version-of-your-name>@<isp-net.com>
My parents still have the email they set up with the minuscule local cable company in the early 2000's. That's only the second email they've ever had outside of the dialup provider email they had in the late 90's (when internet finally came to our small town)
thats how it was in my circles until ~05-06. everyone kept switching emails and used a different address on each service/forum. until gmail came along. suddenly everyone used their gmail address for everything. and even that got phased out when facebook came along.
To use your marriage analogy, this is a MESSED UP marriage. FB is like a spouse preventing you from even socializing with other people of their own gender if they even are a minor threat (i.e. Insta and Whats App getting bought up). FB is a partner who snoops on all your apps without permission. FB is a partner who manipulates your behavior with ads. What kind of marriage is this? Would you marry someone who has been the subject of numerous scandals?
In my view, FB's small upsides of meeting up with distant friends who I honestly don't care for, that's not even 50% recompense for its downsides for me.
Facebook is a partner who snoops on your Facebook without permission!
Even today, Facebook and Linkedin are the only social networks where you have a decent chance of finding someone by searching their real name. It's very powerful.
I was nodding along at this until I read your second paragraph, then had to go back. Apparently you think this was a bad thing?
Losing touch with people is natural. Having to explicitly sever a relationship is awkward. But without a natural pruning function, it's easy to end up with a thousand shallow relationships and not enough deep ones.
People are being hyper-socialized. Its not normal and no doubt causes people increased mental stress.
It is amazing how lazy at socializing everyone is, how if you aren't on the platform they happen to be using you are an afterthought, if you're a thought at all.
I don't have any problem with networking or keeping in touch.
Those are artificial excuses to use a tool optimized and abused for faking ones life and lurking on others.
That said, I disagree with your conclusion. The issues that have come from Facebook and others are due to centralization, commodification of user data, the proliferation of echo chambers and advertising. Universal accessibility isn't the culprit, although that has generated issues on it's own as well.
Had it stayed merely as a way for people to connect then I don't think they would be seeing nearly the same amount of backlash.
- Next, they expanded it, but only to other US schools with .edu domains. That's when I joined, around 2005.
- Finally, they opened it up to the general public everywhere, and by that time they were almost a household name globally.
fb is one of the first social implementation of b.j. fogg's behavior model + and engineered addiction, and the subsequent commoditization of likes and shares
> fb is one of the first social implementation of b.j. fogg's behavior model + and engineered addiction, and the subsequent commoditization of likes and shares
Not rushing into generating revenue helped. Handling scaling up well, compared to its social media competitors, helped.
That was not exactly a Facebook thing really.
And chances are you are never going to speak to that person again even if you are friends on facebook.
The only thing that facebook invented is how to increase user engagement by finding loopholes in our psychology and get us addicted to their products.
Facebook did not invent anything other than making this world more chaotic.
Not really. Chances are, I knew someone who knew that person and could ask them for the contact information. Before Facebook, how do you think people coordinated class reunions decades after graduation, decades after having spoken with most of the people in their class? Sure, it's easier now, but it wasn't as difficult as you make it out to be.
> Before Facebook, if people wanted to organize conversation and cooperation on an information technology platform, the options were to pay $X00-$X000 for a proprietary system, get lucky enough to know about mailing lists, have someone who knew sysadmin do it basically for free, or have everyone learn how to use something like IRC.
Again, it really wasn't that hard. You found where the groups you wanted to hang out with were online. It wasn't restricted to mailing lists or IRC. There were forums, etc... And no, you never needed to know a sysadmin to do any of that. That's just silly.
> Social networking was an enormous pain in the ass.
No it wasn't. You talked to people through the channels you had available to you or, even better, in person!
All Facebook, and social media in general, has done is centralize all of that. I'd argue we're now seeing that such centralization isn't a good thing.
You're right that the problem isn't necessarily Facebook's fault, it's how people are using it and we're just not good at using it. However, I counter that Facebook knows this and is taking full advantage of it for their own benefit. They're purposely showing things to people that they know will get them riled up so they will comment and spend more time on the site. That's just unethical.
It will not get better as long as current management and thinking is leading Facebook.
As more and more of our seemingly public discourse moves online, we are congregating in very much non-public spaces that have their own motives that are often at odds with the public good.
I know Facebook, Twitter and co. need to make money somehow, that's fine, but there's more to this..
How do we reconcile US-based for-profit corporations becoming the stewards of public discourse for an ever-growing part of the world's population?
It's fine to lose touch with people. Some people are meant to drift away as you move forward in life, you can't have everything all the time. Those people still drift away even with facebook, you just have this illusion that they're still in your life. Often you have to watch their bizarre posts as they get old and go nuts. Or some arbitrary algo hides them from you anyway, and you forget they are even in your friends list. This is just me, but I think I'd rather have the fuzzy memories of some high school friend and the closure; the certainty of knowing that chapter of life is done. If both of us can't be bothered to put forth the minimum required effort to keep in touch, so be it. Is it really of any value to have a purely symbolic attachment to this person forever? Look through your full friends list and contemplate this for a while.
It's not certain yet, but the social cost of facebook could potentially be enormous and damaging. In the end will it really prove worthwhile? Should we put up with the "real marriage" after the honeymoon? If it's a sufficiently rocky marriage--if it's a one-sided and abusive relationship--the rational thing to do is not to hold tight, ignore it and ride it out. The right thing to do is plan for divorce. I think this is yet to be determined, but I'm starting to lean towards the opinion that near-exclusively digital socialization was a mistake.
Bear with me here... Was that such a terrible thing? I always dreamed about reconnecting with old friends, and then I did, and many times reality did not live up.
BTW even IRL, knowing my secrets would be more indicative of close family and close friends, a wider circle of people can still be my friend without that level of intimacy.
Complete with loud screaming, soiled diapers, puke on the shoulder, and so on.
However watch-out, things will get better when the baby turns 1, until about 13, then it will get worse... much worse!!!
At some level, much of the criticism of Facebook (especially DHH) don't even try to put into words what Facebook "breach" they're upset about. Is it Cambridge Analytica? Is it one of the drummed up NYT pieces? If you care about this problem, yelling and waiting for someone to break up Facebook isn't a solution. We need discourse to identity what realistic changes we as a community expect.
Did you just drop off the planet between 1995 - 2005? Poor Myspace... everybody just forgot it ever existed. And AIM... ICQ... MSN... Yahoo... not to mention the endless forums on every single conceivable subject. Nobody I knew in the late 90s and early 2000s wasn't using AIM or some other comparable program. It wasn't hard to keep in touch with people.
Facebook didn't invent social networking. All it did was give people a platform to vomit out their every thought for all their friends to see at once.
It was still not at all what Facebook is. I did school works on MSN but there was no history or always on conversations. We scheduled being on MSN to works on something. MSN was the equivalent of a room.
Facebook is the equivalent of a board, you put it there and you let people read it whenever they want, whenever they can. This is game changer. In University, most of the times, we didn't have to schedule time to works on it at the same time, it was and stayed in the Facebook conversation. It was actually quite rare that we were all on it at the same time.
Same goes for events organization. Never ever would I consider doing that on an IM. The difficulty of an events organization is finding time for all people to come together, you can't do that on an IM. Email could do that sure, but it's a clusterfuck, much more slow paced and people are much more prone to ignore them.
So yeah, IM was part of the solution but their ephemeral natures were a huge issue. Yes there were alternative, but they all came down with pretty issues themselves and one of the biggest, is simply that it wasn't used enough by others. I was barely able to convince people to switch from Facebook to Slack for school projects.
I think this is the key that separates Facebook from group emails. Facebook got people into the habit of checking something regularly, so regularly that you could expect that if you post something today, they'll see it within a few days. People never had that habit with email, which is a lot more like mail: you check it when you're waiting for something specific. But you check Facebook when you're bored and want to be entertained with short paragraphs or videos or by participating in gossip.
Facebook is easy to use and accessible everywhere. This is coming from someone that hasn't had a Facebook account since 2009. GP makes great points and the title to this submission is pure clickbait.
MSN being killed is still so weird to me, I get that The Netherlands is a small country, but they had full 100% market dominance, after MSN got killed I bet some researcher could have seen people in The Netherlands just had a communication dip for a year or two.
The messengers were different beasts; in fact, Facebook didn't get instant messaging for quite some time.
Facebook had two things going for it over the other early social networks - the UI was comparatively good, and they platform-ized early. Nowadays folks get angry about "apps that steal your data" but back in that era the apps were the interesting thing. Facebook itself didn't have an event planning system; you relied on third party apps for that.
Facebook also executed well in a way that the other platforms didn't. Friendster just outright failed to scale. But even the other platforms were stuck following the conceptual model of a dating website - they were all about customizing your "page". Zuckerberg gets credit for recognizing the value of a "feed of what your friends are up to" and shifting the core interaction, despite angry protests from entrenched users.
Saying "Facebook didn't invent social networking" is far too dismissive.
But it was insular, normal people didn't care for it. Facebook was the first social network everybody used.
The only platform that 'everbody' kinda fits may is Whatsapp, but then again there is Asia and Line/WeChat.
Before Facebook, if people wanted to organize conversation and cooperation on an information technology platform, the options were to pay $X00-$X000 for a proprietary system, get lucky enough to know about mailing lists, have someone who knew sysadmin do it basically for free, or have everyone learn how to use something like IRC.
Social networking was an enormous pain in the ass. Facebook was the first platform that actually worked for people. Every subsequent social network took their cues from Facebook, it was a veritable sea change in the state of the Internet.
The problem here isn't Facebook, you'd be having these growing pains with any useful social networking technology platform. It's the unintended consequences of Facebook's universal accessibility. Anybody can use Facebook, and so everybody will. It's the story of technology all over again. Technology is invented, we have a honeymoon phase, then the real marriage begins. We're in the "just had a baby, now we need to get it to a year old so we can all relax" phase.
It'll get better.