I still sometimes wonder if anyone else has a good name for what Facebook lost somewhere in the switch between the much more ephemeral "Status" system of 2004's TheFacebook to today's "Posts" and their littered, ad-filled home the "News Feed".
Even the "Notes" system in the middle of the transition was more "opt in" than firehose and a bit more rare and curated by the fewer users using it.
There is a spirit to the old systems lost to the new ones that I can't quite name. In the rush to increase communication overall, and build an addictive platform that people feel a need to check often, perhaps too much of the signal has been drowned out in noise. But that doesn't feel a strong description either because the signals become so different, too.
Statuses were great as a brief update of a friend's change in their state of mind. I could follow up as I saw fit, often just keeping it in mind for the next time we met up.
Posts and news is just a steady steam of information... repeated opinions, content that forms their opinion, attempts at converting others, or minor events that would have been interesting to talk about but bland now that I've seen the highlights online... Often in impersonal monologue form, or equally impersonal many-to-many chat.
Those features gutted the middle of the friend spectrum, their UX no longer aligns with natural social patterns. Humans talk more and about different things as we become closer friend's, slowly acclimating to each other. Facebook is optimized for tight social groups. News posts are useful for my inner group, but I had to unfriend most of my more nebulous connections because their updates were basically spam in the context of my life.
Facebook's features no doubt provides better revenue from ads/targeted spam for shareholders, but they've lost what I found useful for networking and developing new relations. If anything, their new features are impediments.
At this point, I've completely dropped Facebook in favor of email and chat (mix of apps)... It's a better experience than Facebook news and posts, obvious data privacy wins, and my friends and I can share higher resolution pictures without coupling to any specific platform. I haven't found a good alternative for networking, aside from LinkedIn (okish) and plain ol' phone calls/sms/in-store meetups. Maybe that's the best there is.
I think this gets close to the meat of it, yes. TheFacebook in 2004 was still something closer to its yearbook metaphor: here's the people I met this year in college and here's what they wrote on my yearbook that year.
I guess the real emblematic touch point of the change over the years is much more from each person's "Wall" being the important push hubs of conversations to the "Wall" being subsumed by the modern "Timeline" and relegated to an annual flurry of birthday well-wishers and not much else.
That opt-in push mentality versus opt-out pull mentality is quite different: I'm going to go post this cool thing on my friend's wall BECAME I'm going to post this cool thing and maybe all of my friends might see it in their news feeds (if the algorithms deem it maybe worthy and my friends haven't muted me).
Maybe that's why "Events" still seems like one of the bright spots in Facebook? "Events" for the most part still retains a lot of an "opt-in push mentality"; for the most part you still create an event and explicitly invite friends to it. Certainly the News Feed has the pull sort of events and the "I'm Interested" interest pull buttons, but the events I really care about still follow that classic push model, and probably always will...
In TheFacebook we delegated responsibility to post things we cared about to our Walls to our friends. In Facebook we find that responsibility to curate the things we care about in our News Feeds has been delegated to algorithms and advertisers somewhat beyond our control.
I think the new equivalent of "I'm going to go post this cool thing on my friend's wall" is "I'm going to send this to my friend on Messenger", although that can be borderline too once you start talking about groups with more than two people.
I agree Events is the highlight of Facebook these days. Although, it has been steadily corroded as well, and FB Messenger's Plans has muddied the waters a fair chunk.
Weird programming analogy that works for me: it went from being a library to being a framework. For your life.
As in, Facebook used to expect you to have to come and poll it. There was information there about the current state of things, and that information was replaced when people updated their status et al. You had to look, and look often, if you wanted to keep up. It was addictive, in both the good and bad senses of that word.
Today's Facebook is active, making your interaction with it passive; it keeps up to date on things for you, and notifies you when it thinks you would be interested in knowing something. You're the delegate module. You don't talk to it; it talks to you. You never actually have to check it or look at it.
Actually, for another analogy: today's Facebook is almost like a secretary. (It'd be one for real if it could guess your intentions well-enough to automatically accept/reject event invitations.) Like a secretary, there's no reason to go bother them. Nothing useful to be gained by polling. Zero addiction potential.
I wonder if you have a slightly over-romanticized view of the old FB. I got on FB sometime in 2007 and for a few years it was overrun with quizzes and games and such spam. It was a different kind of spam from ad-spam but today's FB seems much more streamlined in many senses.
2004 when I first joined was a year or so before a lot of the quizzes and games and such spam. At the time the "spam" was a large collection of "Groups" that had silly in-joke names specific to your College/University. That time "Groups" were more like a list of hobbies than the "Groups" of today. "Photos" also didn't show up until a few months after I first joined.
I'm not saying we should romanticize the incomplete, under-developed TheFacebook of 2004, but only that the things that made it viral on college campuses in 2004 are very different from those that made it viral among the masses in 2014. I'm not sure which one is better or worse, it's definitely complicated. But there's definitely that feeling that Facebook is not TheFacebook any more. Not just branding, but in... spirit, maybe? Like I said there's word missing that I'm curious to find.
It's hard for me to think of it as "addictive". Every time I use it, I end up scrolling briefly through about 20 different 10 QUICK TIPS, YOU WONT BELIEVE WHAT THIS DOLPHIN DID, and RECIPES MADE TO LOOK QUICKER THAN THEY ARE before I leave.
Facebook was much more engaging when I actually saw words and images coming out of people who I know or once knew.
Even the "Notes" system in the middle of the transition was more "opt in" than firehose and a bit more rare and curated by the fewer users using it.
There is a spirit to the old systems lost to the new ones that I can't quite name. In the rush to increase communication overall, and build an addictive platform that people feel a need to check often, perhaps too much of the signal has been drowned out in noise. But that doesn't feel a strong description either because the signals become so different, too.