January 2008. My friends are asking me every day "when do you join FB?". The pressure is unbelievable: I had never been pushed to do anything in my digital life like signing up for Facebook. Before or after I joined (Instagram comes close though).
January 2018. We’re all on FB but we can’t stand it. We use it but not really. We’re learning about them doing a lot of bad shit that we kind of knew but became lazy about. We tried to force FB to change their UI so that it’s easier to share to whoever you want. They didn’t do shit and kept abusing their power.
In my mind once FB was connecting 1B people online, it was over. I wasn’t wrong. We’re over 2B+ now and it’s impossible to visualize a world where FB doesn’t exist. No one wants to start all over this networking stuff. And FB’s biggest power –it pretty much never went down, which is a spectacular feature at that scale- convinced people that there’s nothing better than FB, which is not wrong either.
I still dream of blazing-fast FB network, apps and programs, a tab-based interface, no algorithm, no ads, a small monthly fee. No circle icons, no dark patterns and deceptive UI/UX design, mute/block buttons that work.
I’m still fascinated though. I often (okay, everyday) fantasize about having a slider in my taskbar to view/hide people’s comments based on their actual age. How awesome would that be that on conversations you care about, you could immediately dial down the noise by hiding everything from people under 30 for example? Or only listen to 15-20 to get a sense of what’s going on with the kids. Well, at Facebook, they do. They probably do that daily. At least some high-profile engineers and VIPs probably can, to this day. I want that power too.
It’s so frustrating that something that useful and great has only been about treating us like recycled garbage. Come one, Zuck. Snort some empathy or some shit.