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Comment by jjaredsimpson | Hacker News Reader

10 years ago I would routinely go to facebook and see friends saying what they were planning to do and make plans with them. Facebook served a real purpose in college (we got it my junior year iirc).

Now its nearly all trash. People bitching, posting memes, sharing slideshows, etc. The only thing I go there for is 1 specific local group and even that is pointless because there is a discord.

Facebook is essentially dead to me, and certainly dead to all my younger cousins 15-19 yos. I feel like I must be missing something, because I have no idea why anyone would visit. It's so negative and low quality.

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I agree with you about the news feed. FB messenger is still the easiest way to contact people (almost everyone has it, you don't need any information being a name). Events are great for easily informing people of what you're doing. Groups are great for alerting a group of people to some information (basically better mailing lists).

Same here. Though I have no way of disambiguating what is FB changing and what is me and my friends getting 10 years older.

Sounds like alienation. Have you tried communal living? Getting more in touch with your friends will make you a more genuine person and you will feel more humanized.

I too have considered communal living as a solution to feeling less enamoured with Facebook than I used to be.

I think it's just something that happens with growth. At first it's a small group and it's cool, then your group gets larger, it's still cool, but now more to manage.. then at some point the group gets so large that unless you're trying to push something, there's often very little that you want to say to your 3rd grade teacher, some guy you met on a bus, your old roommate from ten years ago, your boss, and your grandparents all at the same time.

I disagree. There were very specific product changes Facebook made a while back that fundamentally changed the experience of using Facebook. It was all related to Facebook trying to clone Twitter: public posts by default, emphasis on news articles, emphasis on paid content, deprecation of events, deprecation of groups, and deprecation of photos.

With the implosion of Twitter, Facebook has since undone a lot of these changes, but the damage had already been done. People had already learned to stop going to Facebook to be social.

I don't remember them deprecating events (though I'd believe it), and I definitely don't remember them deprecating photos (like, that one I am having a hard time even conceptualizing, given how awkwardly core Photos has been to Facebook feature set for as long as I've been using it, which has been a very very long time now). Can you provide more context for this?

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