This is something that's been on my mind for the last couple days that I think the rest of you need to consider.
I've used the internet since 1992. Those of you old enough to remember the internet in those days know what this means. It means Lynx. NCSA Mosaic. Gopher. Usenet. FTP. Mail you actually had to download. Netscape and Yahoo didn't exist until '94. For most of the later 90's if you wanted to have a website you had something on Geocities. Tripod. Lycos. Search engines were crap and indexes like Yahoo/ODP were manually curated. If you wanted to talk to people you went on Yahoo chat groups and put up with weirdos, or went on phpBBs and put up power-trippy moderators.
I have seen multiple generations of not just sites, but site technologies and paradigms come and go. Facebook is no different.
It is literally just a website. Nothing more. It can be replaced as casually as typing in a different url.
But muh convenience...
But nothing. I never asked for the internet to exist and was getting along fine without it.
YOU, (Facebook) existed in my universe to the extent that you were useful to me.
No one remembers how truly awesome the web used to be.
Bookmarks worked. You have a link somewhere and chances are it would look the same to the way it looked yesterday, maybe with some extra stuff typed in. People contributed for the love and fun of it, none of this advertising revenue or affiliate codes and when they started making rounds (x10 anyone?) it was resoundingly mocked.
You didn't need a "share" button, you just sent someone the URL via whatever means you wished. Everything was markup, none of this half-working javascript trash on top of everything.
Web-rings. If you found one site focused on a topic you had an easy way of finding most of the other sites on that topic.
Of course half of them were low effort Geocities pages but still. It was distributed.
Yeah you see kids now that make YouTube channels, great right? It's not the worst hobby they could have. But it's all about becoming a rich YouTube star and begging people to subscribe. All the pathetic websites I made about video games as a kid I just wanted someone to look at it. There was no delusion of riches.
Ugh, Javascript, don't get me started. Especially if you work for a big enough company they are always making some ridiculous internal apps where some people mash together a bunch of horrid JS frameworks and the end result is some really pretty that doesn't work at all. It's like I need a wheelbarrow for this project, quit trying to deliver me a dump truck and ending up with a broken one--just give me a wheelbarrow, if I were to put it in a metaphor.
I don't get that.
Back when I was making AMVs it was about hoping you didn't get DMCA'ed by Funimation or the music owner.
Facebook the site is a URL, Facebook the corporation is more useful as a propaganda tool at this point due to how echo-chambers work. It'll be interesting to see how the next gen use the internet precisely because big sites like Facebook are falling out of favor for more instant messaging services like Discord and we might even go back to a 90's sort of paradigm, where search engines are curated by companies so they're useless, you talk over IM instead of Facebook or Reddit because you can't talk there for being censored. Maybe that's the direction the internet is headed in.
No, I don't.
I have never clicked a like or share button in my life. Hell, I rarely even upvoat.
I have literally no idea what two of those are, and I can live without funny gifs.
I think otherwise. That putting it back into its context, as an atomized site existing in a much larger space deprives it of power.
Facebook is one site owned by the multinational multi-billion dollar Facebook corporation.
You're insane to pretend it's just one site.
It's one site, which does not matter to me if I don't use it.
My using something else will compel others to use something else in order to communicate with me.
Yup, you're insane and completely blind to the situation we face
He is too busy staring at the fingernail to see the fist.
The long trail of ruins behind them. Yahoo. Juno. Geocities. Myspace. AOL. Facebook is no different. Their acquisitive nature doesn't change the fact that they are built around a flagship product to which the fortunes of all their ancillary products are linked. Eventually they will fail to acquire the new hotness, it will undermine their flagship, the flagship sinks and them with it.
Amazon is different. They too have a trail of ruin behind them but for them the list of ruins is Sears Roebuck & Co, K-Mart (department stores in general), and the 20th century mall. Their principal competitor is Walmart, which is the big box model refined to its leanest, most brutal form. Amazon is basically what Sears was at the turn of the 20th century, and like Sears they'll survive until the landscape changes (Sears was killed by malls only for Amazon to fill the void Sears used to occupy).
The only reason I made a facebook account is cause my girlfriend at the time wanted to be able to add me on facebook and a neighbor in farmville.
I stopped using Facebook years before I got political. Me and my friends used to run events, so you'd have a massive friend list to invite people to said events. It resulted in me having a feed full of mind numbing stupidity from all sorts of people. I'd guess that it's even worse now that everyone is political, back then I remember little to no politics showing up in my feed.
I wouldn't even go as far to say Facebook was ever useful to me. I've got to be one of the most pathetic looking accounts around since I didn't really use it and would only accept friend requests from actual friends that I already talked to with more traditional forms of communication and I didn't allow family at all.
Unless they decide to kill the Internet, I'm not too worried about getting what I want from it. They won't disconnect it from the world as that would rile up their base and the globalists. People in China have figured out how to get past the "Great Firewall." I'm perfectly fine with it going back to the way it used to be even if it was just for myself. I liked AIM and ICQ more than texting anyway.
I've been looking into these new de-centralized protocols like Matrix for chat and LBRY for video and it all looks fun and exciting to me. I guess it's not as friendly to the non-techy people that want a simple little app and account to download that of course they make their profile their full name and post way too much information about themselves on.
IRC is still a thing, yes?
What killed MySpace? Besides the blaring music they went and let people add to their pages, that is.
Autoplay was indeed fucking cancer.
Embedded midi was king and you shall not disrespect its reign.
Yes.
So stop using it.
You have a staggeringly low appraisal of your own value.
Getting people you know to use a competitor.
Got some money?
I know where to rent cabinet space and fiber from some people who do not give a fuck as long as you can pay.
Yes. I have little personal investment in the outcome of this culture war.
I suppose I've been a bit vague in the past so I'll give you a bit of detail. Y'ever heard of AWS Elastic Beanstalk?
Well... I wrote basically that, ten years before AWS did, in three months, for a startup that had no interest in bringing it to market. We wanted an internal microservices cloud, the companies that offered such things wanted waaaaay too much money, so I built one. The business we were actually doing worked out great and we sold the company. Then the culture changed and I left with my FYIFV money.
The problem is FB has the money to buy out or duplicate whatever new URL you decide to replace it with. Modern big tech companies are nothing like the tech companies of the nineties, hell “failing” boomer Facebook is out earning Microsoft
Oh?
Then explain 4chan.
I never used it for family things, I have used it entirely as a dating program. Lots of easy thirsty girls didn't have their guard up on Facebook like they do on most OLD programs.
Now they are onto my tricks and its been useless for a while.