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this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2024
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Asklemmy
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I agree.
OPs answer of saying that WiFi and phone Internet changed the world is correct, but it's not specific enough or the full truth of the matter.
If we had the Internet and modern phones but the only sites that existed were those from 2002, we'd be living in a very different world.
Mobile Internet is the enabling technology, but if social media didn't exist we'd probably leave our phones in our pockets most of the time.
Facebook existed way before mobile internet was everywhere.
Sure, I was there then. I was on Facebook right in the beginning, when you needed a university email address to even sign up.
So that's true, but it's also true to say that early Facebook wasn't the same as modern Facebook. Early Facebook was - as the name suggested, a place to connect with friends, share pictures and plan events. You'd probably check it once a day to see what was happening, but that was it. And your home feed would be a direct and unfiltered view of what all your friends posted, in the order they posted it, without bias. And you could easily catch up on everything that had happened and then you were finished.
It's the birth of the algorithm and infinitely scrollable tailored content feeds that really defines what social media has become.
This and mobile Internet have really gone hand-in-hand. The algorithm has made us want to be scrolling all the time, and mobile Internet has made it possible .
And it was a feature added later when they wanted to compete with Twitter. Prior to that, no home feed. Just profile pages, a la MySpace. And it was glorious! It was so much fun to leave wall messages to friends, and see whatever others have posted in them too.
When the newsfeed came about, I remember thinking "I don't like it. It's stupid!" mainly because I knew it was a reaction to Twitter. Of course, I got used to it eventually.
But yup. Facebook back then was a neat tool. Not the cesspool that's been for the past 10 years.