Facebook = AOL

I remember in the late 90s being at the house of a friend who was (and is) very tech savvy. The thing that blew me away was that he was dialing up to AOL and looking something up through their portal. Why would anyone use AOL for anything? Well, anything other than creating wall-sized art projects with all the AOL CDs they had gotten in the mail.

The problem is that it was a closed community. It simplified and filtered out the raw parts of the full Internet. It tried to create a one-size-fits-all view of the Web, and by doing so limited the interesting bits, and the potential for growth was stymied.

In the years that followed, AOL declined in favor of interesting startups that promised the world. Some lasted. Some didn't. I still miss the blogging days of about 2006-2010 when the Web seemed limitless, and everyone was so excited to be sharing information with each other. Around that time, however, Facebook opened to everyone and provided an easy to use platform that was filled with hip college students who had been using it out of sight of prying eyes.

Facebook grew, adding in messaging, unlimited picture sharing, a mobile app, and so on. It structured things more rigidly than MySpace. It became the place where everyone who wanted to communicate was on it. Only the Luddites avoided it.

Fast forward to the growth of advertising, meddling Russians, commercial adoption, and the dagger to the heart - the news feed algorithm. I think having companies on FB is not bad, as they can provide an easy way to message and provide deals to their customers. But ripping out the reverse chronological feed of simply everything posted by everyone you knew and were friends with, in favor of FB deciding what it thought you would want to see, that is to me the beginning of the end.

A former student of mine who got a job as a project manager at FB after taking my project management class (before even completing the rest of the degree program and graduating), told me that it is all numbers driven. FB knows that people who use the algorithmic news feed spend significantly longer on the site than those who use the most recent chronological feed. I think that's because they are confused and can't find what they want. Or because most of the content is hidden from the chronological view and only shown on the news feed. The news feed is the default, and I'll often see a glance of something interesting before I switch to the most recent feed, and as I scroll down through the most recent posts, the interesting item from someone who I am friends with never comes up, even when it should.

Then it hit me. We've just rebuilt AOL. We have a one-size-fits-all platform, tightly controlled by their corporate decision makers. We have control of content handed to advertisers. We have an experience that is locked down to be as simple as possible. Look only at the death of blogs for an example of this. It used to be that people would write daily or maybe a couple times a week but at least monthly. And they would write a lot. They would customize the look of the blog, although generally without getting too much into MySpace-esque horrid background designs. The most important, though, is that they would write a lot. Long articles they would work for a long time on, with curated pictures embedded right in the text where it was discussed. Bloggers would link to other blogs or posts on their own blog. The comment section would run wild. What do people write now? A couple sentences? Maybe a full paragraph? Pictures are out there sort of with no context other than a short description. If a post is longer than a couple sentences you can click on a link to show more, but if it's longer than a couple paragraphs it loads into a totally new page that people don't even wait for it to completely load to shut it down. TL;DR (too long; didn't read) becomes the name of the game. That to me is the saddest part of it. We lost thoughtful discussion and editing of deep content in favor of clicking a like button and a couple sentences of writing. The biggest innovation was the reaction buttons where you could not only like something but mark it as something you dislike or are angry or surprised about. We don't even need to write a response showing our surprise. Just click the surprised button.

My favorite part that keeps me coming back to FB every day is the memories, where it will show what you posted on that day some number of years ago. It's a fun way to relive things that have been posted over the past 10 years or so. It's a little private section of memories just for me (that I don't reshare, although some people do). But what is the majority of content on my wall? I've posted about this a couple times recently, here and here, and it hasn't changed much, so I won't do an update. But it's just curated content from big media companies for the most part.

Think about when you do see something interesting on FB, and you go to tell someone else about it (IRL), chances are they have already seen it. Everyone else has already seen the same viral video, the same breaking news story, or the same joke or meme. Think about how decades ago before the rise of cable, everyone watched the same TV shows at the same time, with some time shifting as VCRs became popular. Then cable hit, and everyone was watching different shows. Eventually we had DVRs and later ubiquitous streaming options. But we've cycled back around to everyone watching the same shows or other content. If you're behind on a series, you have to avoid FB so as to avoid spoilers, but then you miss other things, too, so you have to catch up with everyone else.

We have moved away from a creation- and sharing-oriented platform to one of consumption. It's easier to consume what others have created than to create and share our own. And who is creating that content that we are consuming? Big media that invests heavily in FB to keep our attention, because we are afraid of missing out if we disconnect.