Utility of Facebook
It has been pretty fun over the years to see Facebook updates from people who you aren’t necessarily super close to (new job, new house, new relationship, went on a trip, ran a marathon, whatever), but the fun has definitely dried up quite a bit as fewer and fewer people post. Nowadays, most of the more “interesting” stuff I see on FB are from former teachers/professors, coaches, bosses or older family members, as my generation has mostly moved on. As I like knowing about people’s lives and replacements to Facebook have all been pretty lacking, this is an unwelcome development.
Sure, it wasn’t all interesting. A lot of posts end up being somewhat annoying. There is a fine gray line between posting fun-to-see updates and “please like this”/”I want to be popular”/”look how cool my life is” type posts). But I’d still take the mix of annoying and interesting over today’s lack of posts.
Posting as a public good?
Given that I get something out of other people’s posts, it’s somewhat hypocritical of me to post extremely rarely on Facebook (even back when everyone used it). But I always felt like posting was too attention seeking and too off-brand for me. If everyone felt that way we’d have a Tragedy of the Commons and social media would be nothing but ads and sponsored posts.
It’s kinda funny that the way I’m thinking about it basically makes posting updates both attention seeking AND a public good. As I said, it’s a fine gray line. Posting about donating to charity is probably the most extreme version of this. It’s both “look at me signalling I’m a good person” AND “spreading awareness of charity X has the potential to be more impactful than my actual donation and seems like a really good thing to do”. Social justice related posts fit in here as well, though I’d argue the actual impact of them is redacted and while the motivations for posting these certainly vary, signaling.
Alternatives?
People my age (and younger) are all active on Instagram now and the posts on there are generally more picture-focused and less fun/informative. You do get some updates/captions beyond the pictures, but it’s definitely much less common and detailed than what you see on Facebook. Twitter is great (if used properly), but is definitely not designed for the kind of life updates and discussions that I’m talking about here. Snapchat was also fun for a while, but again the content level is/was pretty low. So it would be one thing if we had a worthwhile replacement for Facebook, but it sure seems like we don’t at the moment.
RIP Facebook debates
The non-life update statuses and comments you used to see on Facebook were also pretty fun, though often big wastes of time and not very constructive. The political ones tended to be the most interesting/ridiculous, but sports posts and “any restaurant recommendations in X” type stuff were also good. While 90% of the time the political posts were mostly people arguing past each other, I’ll still take that 100 times out of 100 over the lack of discourse I see nowadays.
You just don't see this level of constructive discourse on Instagram
Instagram stories are kinda the closest thing to people posting statuses/sharing posts on FB. But they seem like a way to post your political statements without having to deal with people disagreeing with you. Maybe you wouldn’t see much political disagreement now anyways since the peak of my FB argument viewing was in high school when people had “friends” all over the spectrum. Is it a recent phenomenon to have friends that are all politically aligned with you? That doesn’t seem to be true among the older people I know. Or maybe it’s just a function of where I went to college because I don’t think it’s true among a lot of people I worked with at Optum.
Facebook’s Downfall
Why did so many people my age leave FB or stop posting on there? And why didn’t it catch on for the yoof? I’d assume it’s the same reason for both but I don’t really know what it is. The decline in posts probably turned into a downward spiral where people felt weirder about posting stuff and also feel like there is less content worth sticking around for, so more people leave and the spiral continues. Or if you’re younger, you never had enough friends that were active on there to make it worth joining. But what started the spiral? I’ve seen a bunch of theories online but none of them seem quite convincing and/or it’s pretty hard to figure out which ones are “correct”. Something about the olds/parents joining and making it less cool/not wanting to share with them seems like part of it. So I’ll leave it at that for now.
P.S We need to break up Facebook/Instagram/Meta because?
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