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Comment by safety1st | Hacker News Reader

I joined Facebook pretty early on, back when you needed to have an email address issued by a university to join. My posts from back then are pretty wild, all very personal stuff and conversations with friends.

I logged in today, not a single mention of a friend in any way, shape or form on my feed. No posts from friends. No comments from friends. No "here's what your friend liked."

Half of the content wasn't even stuff I was following, it was posts that were "similar" to something I liked or to some group I was in.

It's amazing what a bait and switch these companies pulled. They really leaned into it. Google barely resembles a search engine now. Facebook is basically just a billboard.

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It's immensely frustrating, as if you're of a certain age (I am), a non-trivial amount of your formative young adult relationship-building took place through Facebook. I remember having the prescience to lament that this wouldn't allow old relationships to fade away quietly, but instead, through the magic of social media, rot slowly. Joke's on me, it was that and worse.

Zuckerberg and co. muscled their way in and extracted value out of the dismantling of traditional social dynamics and cohesion, and left us with a hole where the scaffolding of youth should have been. Very Uber-esque. Actually, it describes any number of start-ups from the last 2 decades. Maybe "disruption" has a negative connotation for a reason.

I think we just grew up. When I joined Facebook as a teenager in 2008, we essentially had no filter. Every thought, every photo, every relationship update - all of it was immediately shared to Facebook because at the time it was fun and novel and innocent.

For better or worse, millennials have become much more discretionary in what they post online than they were 15 years ago. I imagine Facebook had organic content from your real friends to show you then it probably would, the well's just run dry.

Those in-the-know use private group chats as social media. No "useful" recommendations that tend towards selling you stuff. No trolls swooping in to derail conversations. No capricious design changes. Just simple human-scale interaction.

You used to have niche, semi-public forums. This had the combined benefit of a sustainable culture and moderation for those in the conversation, and an accessible knowledge-base for everyone else. Discord et al. are not a replacement for this.

ShowHN: Automate your group-chat banter with ChatShitGPT.

I've noticed the same with Facebook. It's why I've stopped even bothering to log into the website.

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