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Comment by Chaebixi | Hacker News Reader

> Facebook was great in the early years.

That seems to be depressingly true of any social website. There seems to be a sort, sweet spot that exists briefly between the implementation of a good idea and when the parasites catch on and move in to ruin it.

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Eternal September is the term for that. When the social site begins to accept too much trash because of it's size.

For those that don't know, September was when all the freshmen would get their first access to the non-commercial internet in college. It was a pain because they (we) had to learn all the nuances of how to interact with the people already on it. Newgroups, IIRC, etc. Eternal September is the term for when the internet went commercial in 1995.

Wow that happened 27 years ago. Time does fly.

Time does fly, but 1995 was only 22 years ago!

Hah. Damn rum.

Not to quibble, but it usually refers to 1993, which was when AOL created a bridge from its proprietary network to USENET.

It's about time we all went back to USENET really.

I'd say that's depressingly true of any software that's in continuous development. The only difference is the relative proportion of the parasites that do the damage (users, product managers, and developers) to each other. Apache, I feel, is a counterexample, software with continuous development that hasn't turned to shit yet despite being around for quite some time. Some videogame series are also often quite strong over time. Most everything else is subject to this 'rule', sadly.

I'm not sure I'd blame Facebook's problems on it's users. You can always unfriend someone. No, it's Facebook itself that has changed for the worse (by far).

> I'm not sure I'd blame Facebook's problems on it's users.

I am blaming Facebook. The parasites I was thinking of are the people and impulses that pervert the successful formula to push some agenda (e.g. push for some "engagement" metric, push people to use this or that app, unscrupulous monetization, etc).

What was great about Facebook, especially compared to other social networks, is that you had real control over privacy. It was made to communicate with your "real life" friends and family, and keep control with who can see what.

But year after year they've stepped back on privacy, while still being a completely closed platform compared to the open web.

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