The Internet I Knew (2014)

No, you don't have to. But if everyone you know does, then you have to make a choice. I've had the same "just get on Facebook" experience as the article's author, and it isn't just about "what are we doing this weekend?" It's about human social behavior changing to fit the model implemented by Facebook, because Facebook tries so hard, and so successfully, to be sticky, that eventually everyone is on Facebook. If you're not, then once that's happened, you're no longer part of "everyone", because Facebook's design very successfully seeks to maximize the degree to which people prefer it as an exclusive medium of social interaction, because that's the same as maximizing its revenue stream. The people who run Facebook, and who build it, have by now gotten very, very good at doing exactly that. And their userbase is such that, whatever adverse effects their model of revenue maximization by social behavior monopolization may have, it is by now having them on about one-third of the entire human species. If we include all the other behemoths which use similar models, the fraction of humanity affected grows markedly - half? More?

Yeah, I know, it sounds absurd and dystopian and like something you'd hear from an ideologue of the RMS stripe. Well, I have my differences with RMS, and we've had them out in public before now. And I'd have regarded the things I'm saying as dismissively as anyone might, if I'd heard someone saying them a few years ago. But that would've been a few years ago. Times change.

It was around the time I missed the second wedding, followed by the second chance encounter with one of the parties thereto, and the second heartfelt apology, and the second "but you should really get on Facebook", that I started to really think something was up other than that everyone had just quietly and comprehensively dropped me, over the space of a few months, because I was just that unpleasant a person to have around. Sure, that was my default assumption. But it would seem unlikely in that case for the apologies to be so heartfelt, or indeed to occur at all; they needn't have, no more than the entire conversations in which they occurred, if those who made them hadn't chosen to engage when they saw me out and about. They could've quietly walked the other way. Instead they hailed me and started conversations, in order to apologize for having unintentionally snubbed me, and to warn me I'd better get on Facebook if I didn't want more of the same.

So I had to think something else was up, something outside my own constant suspicion that I exist in the world purely on sufferance and should not be too surprised when that sufferance ceases - and I started looking around for what it might be. What I found was other people who'd had the same kinds of experiences that led me to start looking in the first place. People like the author of this article, who'd also watched their social circles disintegrate around them, and be reconstituted in a form which did no longer include them, in order to make a lot of money for a dozen or so thousand people mostly in California.

Now I've got no problem with people making a lot of money. This is America, after all. And I don't think anyone who works for Facebook is evil, at least not in any higher proportion than the population at large; you get a few bastards in every hundred, sure, but there's no reason to imagine Facebook uniquely concentrates them somehow. But none of that changes the fact that, in the cause of building something that makes those people a lot of money, they have produced a machine for the deliberate mass modification of human social behavior, the like of which history has never yet seen.

I don't know. I feel like there's nothing unreasonable in thinking such a situation has implications a bit beyond "well you don't have to use it". Maybe I'm wrong about that. Maybe I really am the problem here, and Facebook is just a bugaboo. Maybe that's true for everyone else with a story like mine, too. But what if it isn't? Wouldn't that seem a little dystopian to you, there being a website in a position to mediate your friendships? It seems a little dystopian to me.

It's a bit disingenuous to pretend (The) Facebook didn't do anything to connect people. Maybe it's because I graduated High School in 2003, but in early 2005 it was amazing to be able to connect to people you either went to high school with or went to your own university, people who were often living parallel lives but you just didn't know because your high school friends went out-of-state or college was large enough that you would never interact with them. At that point, you could click on anything in anybody's profile and you'd be able to find people who self-identified with that tag, be it music, movies, or anything else. Most of these people were average computer users, they weren't denizens of LiveJournal/Xanga/internet forums, but they were possibly acquainted with Myspace, which was already a ghetto by 2004.

I had friends who were disappointed by the fact that you couldn't style your Facebook page (or track who was visiting your profile). Facebook cleaned up the mess that was Myspace and made it palatable and connecting easy.

Over time, Facebook preferred connecting you to people already in your IRL social network instead of new people, and that's when it started getting boring.

I never heard of it before, but yes that looks pretty much like what I have in mind

In 2005, I used to be in a Battlefield 2 online community with game servers, SMF Forums, and ventrilo for VOIP. I used to play pretty regularly, but when not playing we would all talk and learn from each other. There were maybe 30 people at most from age 15 to 50 years old.

The way we sustained the servers was everyone pitching in to pay maybe $5 to $15 per month.

Moderation and Adminstratuon was volunteer based and people who donated had priority.

We eventually became some of the most popular BF2 servers and it made for interesting social interaction when the admins had to come together to make a decision if someone was cheating or just really good.

I’m sure communities like that still exist but I haven’t played many online games since then. Those were the days :)

I like seeing pictures and videos of my friends having fun! I love all the travel/holiday memorabilia and baby pics - it reminds me that life is short, it's a big world out there, and that you should be good to your loved ones.

You can also hide posts from your bitcoin friends and your boring VC friends ;)