> I just want to go back to where you could use facebook to share what you're up to and see what other folks you know are up to; but apparently that's too 00's to hope for.

And now they have some way for "AI" to write your entire FB post for you. Which I'm sure will end well. Why think for yourself and write what you mean when you can let AI do all the thinking for you?

It frees you up to focus on the most important part of the experience: organic ad clicks.

How about a choice for which social circle you'd like to view at one time. We could call it "Circles".

that would be so wildly popular we could see a Diaspora

Maybe it could have page customization features that let you upload html. Have it be a really custom space of your own.

Could even start to resemble some sort of city

You would need a ring of people to help navigate around it.

At that point so much of our lives would start to be recorded digitally the internet could act as a kind of shared memory for the whole community

A living journal of some sort?

pastebin

Xanga

That might threaten current business models. The angles would set that on fire.

Would they use tripods like in war of the worlds?

By far the biggest thing people remember about Google+ was the hamfisting of it (several people lost their Youtube accounts) and yet people also reported that it was otherwise a good experience (compared to the Facebook feed); one thing Google had to contend with was Facebook not offering access to the social graph so they had to build the network effects by a more difficult route

eg Facebook replacing people's email addresses, one wonders if it was partly a way to fight Google+ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433

I lost my original YouTube account due to Google+ spawning a new one from my gmail address I’d used to sign up for YT in the early days.

It’s been years and I’m still mildly annoyed about losing it.

Google also spawned a second one for me from my original gmail address, but I still use my original pre-google+ youtube account. After signing in to that google account on any given device, I have the option to switch between the two youtube accounts associated with the email.

That must be nice. Was your YT account also from before the acquisition?

My original account still exists and my face is in the videos as well but but I have no way to log in and support couldn’t or wouldn’t help me.

The original YT account associated with the email was created in mid-2010, so not pre-acquisition.

It's good that you have access to both; out of curiosity, is there any differentiation in the way it list them in the menu where you pick which one to use, or is the order consistent? I can imagine being mildly annoyed if I had to guess every time I logged into a new device which one was the one I wanted, although obviously that's still better than just not having a choice.

The one created for google+ is usually listed first. After signing into my google account on a new device, the google+ one is also the one that I'm usually automatically signed into.

If Google had any direction and purpose, it could have kept not fucking up Circles until Facebook (almost inevitably it seems in retrospect) messed up.

If Google just added customer happiness to their usual stuff it would fix a lot of things.

Can I just say, the comments that have happened here before mine, have been stellar. Wow. And also, it's so weird to have some nostalgia for all of this now...

> I just want to go back to where you could use facebook to share what you're up to and see what other folks you know are up to; but apparently that's too 00's to hope for.

But do folks you know post? I’m under the impression that the slop churned out for clicks are all that’s left.

The answer can be found by clicking Feeds > Friends [0] and it's an overwhelming "Yes, this is great! Wait, 90% is 'shared' from someone I don't know anyway, not written by my friend, so it's only a slight improvement."

[0] https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr (this URL seems to work on a desktop browser only; use the menu items in other situations)

If they do, I'd probably be the last to know -because slop.

Over time, fewer and fewer of them post, and they post less and less.

I post a lot less than I used to as well. At least in part this is because my feed is drowning in unwanted noise. Facebook's desparate attempts to wave stuff in my face 'for engagement' drive me away from posting more, so it becomes a vicious circle, driving down engagement, making people post less, round and round we go.

Maybe I'm weird, but if my friends aren't posting much, that's OK, that's what I came here to check. Instead I'm assaulted by noise, quite a lot of it either scammy or offensive.

I also post less because anything I say seems to be immediately shown to the person most likely to be outraged by it.

I used to use it like a daily "here's what I'm up to today" blog, because my friends and family would see that and it was a cool way of sharing my life with them.

The, somewhere around 2014-ish, it was suddenly unsafe to post normal stuff without getting criticised. I had a whole series of arguments with folks about things that I or they had posted. I stopped posting as much, and started checking all my posts first, and deleting old ones.

Then in 2017 I got a stalker who messaged all my friends and family with shit about me. I had to make my friends list private and unfriend a bunch of people (no great loss). It felt even more unsafe.

Now I post travel pics and that's it. I miss the old safe space.

Maybe Zuck should apologize for that - he's quite good at groveling to Congress. He may also want to apologize to investors for totally shifting Meta's focus to VR despite it being clear that it is not as big as he claimed. But he likes being underestimated.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/news/mark-zuckerberg-rather-under...