Facebook, the social network old-timer, turns 20

Facebook sucks..

This also marks the tenth anniversary of the last time Facebook was useful to anyone as a social media tool.

I help manage a Facebook page which provides information often only available in Japanese regarding our town to our local English-speaking community. It is quite popular.

And my little universe of friends is a diaspora, scattered across continents. FB is the only way we can all keep in touch.

Life would be much smaller and lonelier without it.

And my little universe of friends is a diaspora, scattered across continents. FB is the only way we can all keep in touch.

Yeah up until about 10 years or so ago Facebook was great for this. My feed was full of updates from friends back home and elsewhere that I hadn’t seen in years but could keep in touch with on there.

Today my feed is full of ads and promoted content. Maybe 10% of the people I am connected with on Facebook still post anything. The rest have all abandoned the platform completely over the years. Its become a barren desert, a hollow shadow of what it used to be.

I only maintain the account because there are a few people I am only in touch with on there, otherwise I’d have deleted it years ago. Its a shame because it really was a useful and valuable tool back in the day and there isn’t anything that has replaced its former utility.

Facebook and YouTube were once the go. Now there are adds everywhere and YouTube will give you and ad-free experience for the dirt-cheap bargain of $179.88 a year. The once great sites have sold out and it won't be long before you'll have to pay to check email. They've kinda done a number on the WEB.

great spying and censorship toll.

bigpass.

I really liked FB until about ten years ago. A lot less ads and a whole lot more of my friends' posts.

Now I sometimes go to my friends' pages and find that they've posted a bunch of pictures or comments but they never ended up on my feed. This sucks.

I use Facebook to stay in contact with friends and keep up to date on music releases. My elderly mother spends much more time on it, watching animal videos and connecting with friends and family. In all those years I've never seen anything on it more unpleasant than a few clips of Boris Johnson. It's extremely useful for what it was always designed for. The herd who attack it, probably don't use it. If you are worried about privacy or people are being unpleasant to you on it, just use the tools that are available to block stuff. That is what they are there for. As for targeted adverts and slurping my data - the targeting isn't very accurate, but it is better than untargeted ones. I don't really care if Facebook know what I'm checking out on it. It's certainly better than having to pay for it. If you are really worried about privacy, why are you on social media (it's all about sharing things). Why are you on the net at all. Because your government already have universal surveillance up and running. Facebook is the least of your problems.

@Speed. Yes, friends' stuff not appearing on your feed now is annoying. I think it was a response to the endless privacy complaints. You can prioritise posts by some of your friends, but it would be better if they rolled that back to the way it was.

Distributed social media would be better, maybe via the e-mail protocol, forking an open source mail client to handle rich media, but nobody is doing it. GAFA haven't innovated much in years. The corporate mentality is to defend the status quo and not kick off any more moral panics, as GAI has done.

I only use messenger and the groups stuff. Posts from mates were drowned out by commercial stuff years ago.

Endless ads