I actually made something quite similar to this with a few friends as an app 14 years ago using Wikipedia data. We called it LineTime, it was a fun little project! (Wow, I even found our video from back then...and man, that really was a LONG time ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eW__WZ6pxJ8)

Facebook was not ”human progress”. Future historians will point to its founding as a pivotal point of regression of democracy and humanity.

In a grand view removed 1000 years from now the introduction of digital communication and their network effects must have been pivotal though even if it was in a negative way (which very well may be). I just doubt that would then be a point about Facebook specifically as this is just a tiny slice of that era, I think.

MySpace was much earlier, as well as a few other forerunners

We are a tiny slice of history. A thousand years from now we may be hazily recalled as the period that slavery was abolished (edit: sadly enough we probably won't be) , electricity and computers were invented, 3 of the world wars occured, and the first great population explosion and cultural implosion took place. Most electronic information will be lost so our century will be known as the electronic dark ages. All of this will be studied by the advanced artificial intelligence entities and the sentient cockroaches, the last surviving carbon life forms on earth.

3 world wars?

It's the reverse of the Cloaca Maxima, the Roman empire sewage system. Facebook is where unprocessed sewage is fed back to the people, straight into their hands.

*Straight to their heads.

Preach brother, preach! :)

I put Facebook up there to point towards the beginning of social media.

Social media was "progress" in the same sense that atomic weapons were.

They certainly have their proponents, and they certainly led to measurable effects on society, so I agree their inventions were important. But "progress"?

There was social media before Facebook, though.

I think if social media is WW1, then the launch of Facebook will be considered as the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Not in itself sufficient, but a point that really got some important balls rolling.

That wouldn't be the foundation of Facebook, that would be Facebook introducing the algorithmic timeline. Remember that Facebook explicitly considered it a success because it increased "engagement" while the vast majority of its users reacted negatively to it and when commenting on it indicated that it made them feel worse, that it negatively transformed the kind of social interactions they had on the platform and that it was detrimental to their mental health (because previously Facebook had been centered on 1-to-1 and many-to-1 interactions between peers and now was about 1-to-many interactions with an audience - something I guess Google tried to mitigate in its own social media experiment somewhat unsuccessfully by letting you group your "friends" into "circles").

The revolutionary change that made Facebook uniquely successful wasn't being a social media platform, it was forcing its users (who were so far treating it as a way to keep in touch with acquaintances, old friends and distant family) to compete for each other's attention and offering corporations the opportunity to join that competition - all the while retaining the messaging that the platform is about "social" interactions between peers. And of course mining the everliving #### out of their users' data while non-consensually tracking them across the entire web without their knowledge.

But the "attention is the currency in the marketplace of ideas" concept they launched pretty much defined all "social media" companies from that point on, which is why we nowadays often forget the term used to be much more appropriate in the past (although often constrained to a crowd of very technical nerds).

Oh, and of course they very successfully killed much of the tradition of the Open Web by encouraging a walled garden approach even when it required them to actively defraud their advertisers by lying about the performance of video content. But I think the trophy for launching that extinction event belongs to Apple when they pivoted away from the original web-first concept for the iPhone to the proprietary App Store.

Yes, but I think it makes a nice view to point to some first popular instance of something. Otherwise everything becomes fuzzy. For example, there was AI in the 60s. But ChatGPT was the first that achieved mass adoption.

There were printers before Gutenberg, but printing Chinese ideograms was a totally different challenge. Yet the list mention printing, not Gutenberg.

The invention of radio brought us in short order the Volksempfänger or the German people's receiver, and its consequences...

Radio is a technology. Facebook is an application of technology. The internet would be a better comparison which arguably has overwhelming positive impact.

Radio and internet have both had positive and negative effects. One can also say they are only neutral platforms, and people have then created positive and negative things with them. Same can be said about Facebook or Reddit too IMO. At what point does the morality start, complex question.

Then surely the same complaint could be made about some particular radio stations.

You could say the same about fossil fuels, moreso perhaps, but we don't, because that would be pedantic.

Well, there’s no need to be pedantic about that particular point, because nobody put fossil fuels on the list of human progress.

I've seen estimates that world population would be billions fewer without fossil fuels.

They have big costs, but also big benefits.

I've seen estimates that the curvature of the world is zero. I'm not obliged to believe every estimate I read.

Makes me think of the Histomap, designed in 1931. It's an attractive design for history over a timeseries: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/...

In 1942 he did one for Evolution which is closer to your pitch (log scale Y axis, etc): https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~2...

This misses the overview. It has lots and lots of technologies all at the same size. And no way to zoom out.

It's not ideal, but you can look at the bottom bar and get a sense of density of innovation over a certain time period.

I know it was just an example, but out of curiosity, why 1982 for home computers? Commodore 64?

Not sure why it was listed as '82, but if it was the C64, it makes sense. It's the most sold personal computer ever.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64

Nuance around this fact would be completely lost in 100 years, let alone 1000 from now.

I’d probably put 1978, but it doesn’t really make much difference if you say it was the TRS-80, Apple II or the c64. The thing happened about then.

started something like this, but without the "zoom" https://timeline-of-everything.milst.dev/

seems very 20th and 21st century biased lol.

Like this? https://history-timeline.site/

For now it seems to be just a list.

If it had a "significance" attached to each event and a slider one can use to set the significance threshold, then it would be what I mean.

Gutenberg was active around 1450, not 1550, and that’s important, because Luther nailing those 95 “theses” (complaints) to the door of that church in 1517 wouldn’t have had nearly the impact it did had there not already been a network of moveable type presses throughout Central Europe for a few decades.