Do you remember the early days of Facebook, 2007-2010 or so? There was a time when Facebook was just direct posts written by friends, photos they posted, and ... no links, no articles, no newsfeed algorithm, nothing else. Hell, at one point there wasn't even a newsfeed, you actually had to visit everyone's page (though iirc you could subscribe to a notification when certain friends posted?).
I'd pay $5/month for that 2009 Facebook back. And honestly I'd pay $20/month to get that for my parents and a couple of other family members who've experienced serious brainrot as a result of years of feed addiction. They wouldn't know where to find garbage 24/h news articles without FB.
I hope they hadn't even tried. Initially, Facebook offered lots of value in the early years in the form that users were actually able to follow their friends' lives and stay connected. You had a bunch of friends and you would see a mostly chronological list of what they had posted that you read until you recognized something you had already seen. If they had kept it that simple Facebook might actually be something I'd be willing to pay for. The newsfeed is absolutely the core of the product and they started ruining it about ten years ago, and very steadily at that.
Facebook was so great back before they monetized it. About 7 years back, I loaded up some mobile version of Facebook intended for feature phones in developing countries. I don't recall what the url was, but it was really basic, and it just had a simple chronological timeline you could piece through. I went back to my years in college, and it was just friends saying hi, asking to hang out, talking about mutual interests. There were no news articles or public posts, effectively no memes, and zero outrage. I know these sorts of observations are nothing new on HN, but it left such a stark impression on me that I still remember it all these years later.
This was studying Facebook circa 2004-2006. That version of Facebook was laughably basic at that point. If I remember right it was a chronological list of posts on your wall. There was no algorithmic feed. Hell, the news feed at all was only launched in late 2006. There was no video. There were no ads. Nobody made content hoping to get rich and outrage didn’t sell. If only we could go back to such an innocent time.
I remember back in 2005-6 when I thought that News Feed, Events and other stuff introduced to Facebook was a bunch of cluttered junk. If I could have seen into the future then... the horror, the horror!
The newsfeed was added later. They integrated it from a company they bought. I almost quit Facebook when it was added. In retrospect, it was so much better than what we have now. It has an end, was in chronological order, wasn't filled with spam and propaganda
what made the original facebook so great is that it was
1) semi-exclusive (ei. your parents weren't on it)
2) The content you saw on your feed was 100% things that your direct friends manually typed or shared with you. No recommended posts from strangers, no corporate pages, no ads, no games, no articles from groups that you follow to keep up with the local news (eg. HOAs, local politicians, news station), no posts from extended family members that you accepted as friends out of peer pressure, etc.
Trying to grow and become that one-stop-shop for everything the internet has to offer is what ruined it. Having your mom, your 7 yr old cousin and the local shops on the same platform as young adults is more profitable for facebook, but it doesn't make it better for the users.
The only platforms that have kept their reputations over the years are those with leaders that knew how to say no to ideas that compromises the great/unique aspects of the platform in exchange for a larger quarterly profit.
No ads, no political spam, no viral garbage, no pictures of what your friend ate for dinner, no psychologically manipulative algorithms. Just people talking to their friends and posting pictures of themselves hanging out.
If someone made a new social network like that, I'd sign up today.
I don’t remember what Facebook had instead of a news feed in 2008, but I do remember thinking Facebook was so cool then. When messenger came out, it was amazing. It was totally normal then to message random people who you thought were cool and just have a conversation. I would even get random chats from Facebook employees. It just seemed so different then than now.
I’m just trying to piece together the evolution of Facebook, feeds, and then when I stopped caring. Like, I don’t think the feed was always like this. At one point there was nothing, sure, but there was also at one point a reverse chronically sorted log of what your friends were doing I think? That was the best. By the time my parents were on I think there was a few years of overlap before I just forgot about it.
I remember a time when all my friends were on Facebook. Being able to connect in a concrete way with people that lived far far away seemed magical. Facebook was that scrappy SV upstart that wanted to change the world and provided an ads free experience focused almost completely on people. It seems like a hazy memory, but I do remember liking it and imagining it as an agent of good in the general scheme of things. Very different from the toxic wasteland it is today.
I don't know if it's just nostalgia talking, but I feel like a decade ago Facebook really was good at connecting people. I enjoyed it, because most of the content was real people you knew having conversations, or sharing pictures they had taken. I eventually left because it was honestly just boring. My timeline was nothing but shared posts from big content pages, which of course became mostly bad politics over time.
Between 2007 and 2009 it was a far west for Facebook apps.
A gift app that you could write with about 100 line of code could reach 10 millions of users in 2 days. More complex apps could do better. That was the most amazing part.
At that time the Facebook's API was pretty much open and you can get everything. It was an experiment and Mark Zuckerberg had a lot of hope in what people could do with that data to add value to the users. I was not doubting that he was doing it with good intentions. But he was naive...
Unfortunately, most of the apps were abusing all the channels that Facebook was giving them to get more users and milk money out with ads and micro-payments (ex: through OfferPal Media - now Tapjoy).
During that time I was pretty surprised how much info people were giving away with a click through. Even on the main Facebook product people were posting all kind of stuff, including stupid things they were doing. It really seemed that people were becoming more open and it was the beginning of a new era for privacy (or lack thereof).
Facebook realized pretty quickly what apps were doing and they started adding more granular permissions.
Eventually Facebook started limiting more and more access to the API until 2011/2012 when the user generating gold mine was pretty much gone. Again, Facebook has always been working to fix the experience for their users and also to make clear that those where 3rd party apps. But people did not really care.
There have been probably hundred of thousands of apps that had access to "sensitive" user data. According to the Facebook's Term of Service, data could not be stored for more than a certain amount of time. But nothing was technically preventing people to store that data forever...
Ah, I remember those days - or the days right after those days (I was at NYU and got Facebook in late '04). It was so much fun to friend someone you met, see where they were from, all their interests (some real, some comical), what crazy comments happened to be on their wall, and what "groups" they belonged to.
The Facebook of today is still valuable, but in an entirely different way. Facebook in 2004 had nothing to do with sharing content, it was just a database of people that you'd met in college that was exceptionally fun to browse. That database of people aspect is almost entirely hidden now in favor of the feed (useful but different), and what you "like" (the pages where you clicked "like" to get a $2 coupon).
I recall reading somewhere PG saying there may be an opportunity now for a "Facebook for college students", which I'd imagine as a realization of the early value of Facebook. I've batted around the idea of setting up oldfacebook.com, just as a copy of that early version. Heck, you could even let people sign up by connecting with Facebook.
I'd pay $5/month for that 2009 Facebook back. And honestly I'd pay $20/month to get that for my parents and a couple of other family members who've experienced serious brainrot as a result of years of feed addiction. They wouldn't know where to find garbage 24/h news articles without FB.
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