Hacker News Reader

Comment by msgodel | Hacker News Reader

From the very beginning Facebook has been an AI wearing your friends as a skinsuit. People are only just starting to notice now.

View on HN

Perhaps naive to say, but I think there was the briefest moment where your status updates started with "is", feeds were chronological, and photos and links weren't pushed over text, that it was not an adversarial actor to one's wellbeing.

There was an even briefer moment where there was no such thing as status updates. You didn't have a "wall." The point wasn't to post about your own life. You could go leave public messages on other people's profiles. And you could poke them. And that was about it.

I remember complaining like hell when the wall came out, that it was the beginning of the end. But this was before publicly recording your own thoughts somewhere everyone could see was commonplace, so I did it by messaging my friends on AIM.

And then when the Feed came out? It was received as creepy and stalkerish. And there are now (young) adults born in the time since who can't even fathom a world without ubiquitous feeds in your pocket.

Call me nostalgic, but we were saner then.

Unless I’m remembering wrong, posting a public message on someone else’s profile was posting on their wall. Or was it called something else before it was somebody’s wall?

It didn't have a name. It wasn't really a "feature." You just went and posted on their "page" I guess I would call it.

The change to being able to post things on your own page and expecting other people to come to your page and read them (because, again, no Feed) wasn't received well at first.

Keep in mind, smartphones didn't exist yet, and the first ones didn't have selfie cameras even once they did. And the cameras on flip phones were mostly garbage, so if you wanted to show a picture, you had to bring a camera with you, plug it in, and upload it. So at first the Wall basically replaced AIM away messages so you could tell your friends which library you were going to go study in and how long. And this didn't seem problematic, because you were probably only friends with people in your school (it was only open to university students, and not many schools at first), and nobody was mining your data, because there were no business or entity pages.

Simpler, simpler days.

I joined Thefacebook in 2005. The place on your page where posts from other people appeared was called the “wall” then.

Yeah, that's about when it changed. The lack of a wall was a very early situation. I joined in 2004, back when it was only open to Ivy League and Boston-area schools.

It was still acceptable to write on someone else's wall when they came to be called that. You can still do that now I think but it's quite uncommon and how it works is now complicated but settings.

Sure, you could. That wasn't the problem. The problem was that now you could post on your own.

That's what turned it from a method of reaching out and sending messages to specific people when you had something to say to them to a means of shouting into the void and expecting (or at least hoping) that someone, somewhere, would see it and care what you had to say. It went from something actively pro-social to something self-focused.

Blogs and other self-focused things already existed, but almost nobody used them for small updates throughout the day. Why do you think the early joke about Twitter was that it was just a bunch of self-absorbed people posting pictures of their lunch? Nobody knew what to do with a tool like that yet, but the creation of that kind of tool has led to an intensity of self-focus and obsession the world had never seen before.

The wall was released maybe 6 months after Facebook launched. I think it was still called “The Facebook” at the time.

Oh wow, I’d even forgotten about pokes. Thanks for that trip down memory lane.

I made the mistake of sending a Gen Z (adult) friend a poking finger emoji to try to remind him about something.

It wasn't the first time I've had a generational digital (ha) communication failure, but it was the first time I've had one because I'm old and out of touch with what things mean these days!

Still a supported feature! You can find it if you dig around in the menus long enough.

The early, organic days of social networking are always fun. They never would have pulled in billions of users if they started off how they are now.

Couldn't have said it better.

Nothing is a social network anymore.

Everything is a content-consumer a platform now.

People just want to scroll and scroll

People want to scroll and scroll, because social media make them miserable [1, 2, 3]

Perfect storm.

[1] https://time.com/4882372/social-media-facebook-instagram-unh... [2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-social-media-... [3] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/navigating-the-maze/...

My hunch is that instant messaging is slowly taking over that space. If you actually want to connect with people you can without needing much of a platform.

I mean let's be clear on the history and not romanticize anything, Zuck created Facebook pretty much so he could spy on college girls. He denies this of course, but it all started with his Facemash site for ranking the girls, and then we get to the early Facebook era and there's his quote about the "4,000 dumbfucks trusting him with their photos" etc.

There is no benevolent original version of FB. It was a toy made by a college nerd who wanted to siphon data about chicks. It was more user friendly back then because he didn't have a monopoly yet. Now it has expanded to siphoning data from the entire human race and because they're powerful they can be bigger bullies about it. Zuck has kind of indirectly apologized for being a creeper during his college years. But the behavior of his company hasn't changed.

Well they had to grow the userbase before they could abuse it :)

Very true! I was annoyed by the loss of the "is" pattern and basically stopped using Facebook when the chronological feed was removed.

They were stealing your contacts from wherever they could get them. There was never a time when they didn't abuse their users.

Nah, not from the very beginning. Before the News Feed, The Facebook was great to find people and keep in contact. Following someone’s page too often was called Facebook stalking and was socially discouraged.

Unfortunately parasocial behavior is good for engagement.

This is a perfect illustration of misaligned AI.

The AI is given a proxy goal- 'maximize engagement'- which it achieves perfectly.

The user's goal - 'foster genuine connection' - is completely secondary.

The AI isn't malicious, it's just ruthlessly effective at optimizing for the wrong thing.

I don't think it's AI

the problem with meta is three fold:

1. zuckerberg is completely misaligned

2. facebook has hundreds of billions dollars of resources

3. zuckerberg has total control of facebook

normally a company with this level of resources would not be under the total control of a single individual

other shareholders would have pushed back on the obviously bad ideas of "metaverse" and "training AI on private photos of children"

but with facebook: misaligned zuckerberg is in total control, and no-one can stop him

so the rest of the world has to suffer whatever this amoral asshole wants to inflict upon them this month

now add AI into this, and zuckerberg can inflict even more damage onto society with fewer and fewer people to get in his way

(the same applies to Google and Musk's empire too)

They didn't even have algorithmic feeds from beginning, so no.

There was a sweet spot right after the first big redesign and before the wall feed changed where things felt good. I was in high school still too, and lived in another state during the summer, so even if I didn't use it A LOT, it still really helped me keep up with some of my friends. Interestingly though, my best friends basically never posted anything.

What delusional nonsense. What AI was Facebook using in 2005?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com