I disagree. There were millions of people socializing on many different platforms for years before anything like Facebook was created.

I also disagree. The "curation" algorithms and other systems clearly have a serious influence. Facebook is not responsible for human nature, but they are responsible for intentionally guiding it for profit and ignoring the consequences. It's not as if Facebook is merely tabula rasa; they meddle.

There have been many examples of executives and engineers who have spoken to this effect:

https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-engineer-resigns-tr...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6e1riShmak (Chamath Palihapitiya)

FB is the network of people on your green list, and FB's most pronounced "algorithmic" influence is deciding priority on a feed of your green-listed friends, but ultimately one has to ask -- can you handle your own relations? Are your friends' ideas just way too infectious for your free will to handle?

> Are your friends' ideas just way too infectious for your free will to handle?

Good point, but I'll add: if the ideas they are spreading weren't infectious, they wouldn't be spreading them in the first place.

I've been on FB lately because my local government has decided that it will use FB to give background info and outlooks wrt Covid-19. From what I saw in the local groups, the "ideas" people spread are not original content, ever. They don't have those ideas, they just read them and say "yeah, share", so the ideas that make it to your feed have proven themselves many times to be infectious. There's a reason we call it "going viral".

The difference is though, with the internet evolving, the platforms were figuring out their revenue models, and we can see now which model turned out superior.

AOL aged people still remember A/S/L?

We are simply living in the Eternal September.

Millions, yes. Billions, no.

I seriously doubt there are people out there with billions of people on their contact lists, so why would that matter?

And not all of them combined were as successful as Facebook was at its peak.

By what metric should success be measured for a social platform?

>Facebook is merely the conduit of human behavior that happens when lack of regulation / social norms

some time ago I would have agreed on some level but there is too much manual and/or algorithmic manipulation to encourage "retention", "stickiness", "addictiveness" (whatever the current marketing-speak du jour for dependence is) to be a true reflection of behavior.

thats the irony of the current state of social networks - its not just merely allowing conversation/connection; its about encouraging rage, confrontation, polarity. in the pursuit of metrics, ergo dollars.

and even worse, we then look at the distorted reflection we see in the digital mirror and our view of society/discourse is negatively reinforced. what a loop.

#1 is very much the case right now as well. With the lockdown, many people I know started to use social networks for more than just showing off or pushing a message. They finally began to socialize and support each other.