This statement is laughable:
> The thing that actually holds old friendships together and provides endless opportunities to interact with other people that you would have never done otherwise
Facebook's innovation was trapping users in a walled garden with omnipresent surveillance and advertising, perfectly timed with mass adoption of social media.
Assumption: Facebook is more effective at capturing attention than TV, TV was more effective than radio, radio was more effective than newspaper.
Follows: If this process continues, at some point we will develop something which captures attention as perfectly as possible.
Opinion: That hypothetical end case is most certainly a social ill, especially for democracies.
So whether it's Facebook, or whether it's the thing after Facebook, if we keep stepping down this path we're eventually going to end up somewhere very dark.
That isn't an innovation. They're AOL 2.0.
So... a shopping mall? A school? Any corporate job? A walk through downtown? "In-network" minutes and long distance charges on your phone? Religious institutions?
Whatever Facebook is doing wrong for society, they are standing on the backs of giants. Walled garden or not, surveillance or not, advertising or not, people have never been as free to socialize as they are today. If there is something negative on your Facebook feed, you are solely responsible for it being there. It takes two clicks to make it go away forever.
What do I click on to make the stuff Facebook decided I shouldn't see show up?
Content editors and curators have existed for a long time.