I recently came across this tweet talking about the top social media platforms over the past~17 years, and remembered the chokehold Facebook had over my online social media for about 5 years or so.
(Sidenote: I did find it a bit surprising that Twitter wasn't in top 10 as of 2021 (although it’s doubtful whether YouTube and instant messaging apps like WhatsApp can be considered “social” media apps))
I was transported back to the social media landscape back then and how it influenced the way people used to interact. There was no algorithm, no clickbait articles. Rage comics and the trollface were the peak of humour. 9gag was the ultimate destination for memes. And of course, it was almost exclusively used by a very young generation, a play park with no adults around. It was bliss.
I joined Facebook in ~2007 (for legal purposes this is not true. I was 13 years old when I joined the platform). Within a couple of years almost my entire school was on the platform and it became a social currency in itself. People who weren’t that popular in school but who had a strong online game suddenly rose up the social ladder, Facebook dramas were talked about the next day in school. If you weren’t on Facebook, you were missing out.
I find it interesting how Pages on Facebook have evolved over the years. Pages were not like what they are today. Liking a page simply meant signalling interest in a particular topic (sports teams) or person (celebrities) rather than becoming sources for consuming content from. Soon after, the number of pages a person had liked showed up on their profile and having liked more pages than someone else conferred on you a weird sort of bragging right. Thus saw the rise of filler pages that were essentially just long winding names that were meant to be relatable enough to have people liking them. About 10 years on, all those pages have become ghost pages in themselves, often being sold to the highest bidder who then use the page’s massive following to link to their own clickbaity articles in hopes of gaining ad revenue.
Facebook’s introduction of the wall added a new way of interacting with friends. You’d write on each other’s walls and conversations would go back and forth for months. There was an entire etiquette in itself about wall-posting. You wouldn’t reply to a friend’s wall post, that was something a person not involved in the conversation would do. The correct way to continue the conversation was to post back on their wall, and to reply to all threads of conversation, usually separated by line breaks.
Then came the poke wars. At its peak I was easily in a perpetual poke streak with about 15 people. It was simple and elegant. The epitome of low-maintenance relationships while letting the person know you were still thinking about them. It was the perfect way to initiate conversation with that girl you liked without having to worry about being creepy or sending an unsolicited DM. The weirdest poke war I’ve been in was with my 6th grade math teacher after I graduated high school.
I’ve been on Facebook long enough to remember all of their major design upheavals, and even have a weird nostalgia for the old homepage and timeline view. Keep in mind that back then there was barely any social media alternative. Twitter had just sprung up and uprooting your digital social media home for another one with almost no one in it made no sense. Twitter itself was in its initial stages, with a 140 character word limit, no images. (Talking mostly from a personal viewpoint, there were people using the platform but no one from my wide circle)
I know that most people (myself included) dread seeing Facebook Memories show up these days because it’s filled with cringy reminders of our past selves as well as bad memories from people we aren’t in touch with anymore. But I always looked forward to seeing those everyday, because after years of staying away, seeing old status updates and tons of wall-posts from almost a decade ago was a peak into a different era on the internet, a study into the lives of how people, including me, interacted with each other on social media, and how sometimes that persona was so different from the one we had in real life.
This was an age before the rise of smartphones and autocorrect, where texting meant typing on a 12-button numpad and short-forms of words were prevalent to avoid typing too much. My password was even chosen such that it was the starting letter on a few numbers so I could quickly type it out without having to click on any number multiple times. I remember being so proficient at that form of texting that, while walking, I’d put my hand in my pockets and type out long messages just by feeling out the buttons, something that was possible simply due to the tactile nature of mobile phone buttons designed back then, and not to mention there was never the fear of accidentally clicking something else, something that seems so easy to do now because of accidentally touching anywhere on screen. This method of typing, or rather having these means at our disposal, gave birth to the emoticon, the ancestor of the emoji, which had a whole language and cultural appropriateness in itself. No emoji today can correctly translate the emotion behind a “:D”. The streets will remember when “xD” was all you would see on your timeline, a phenomenon discarded as quickly as it was adopted, but still used by some in obscure crevices on the internet even today.
I also noticed that Facebook usage was highly popular with all of my Riyadh friends but barely anyone from Mumbai. Going through someone’s archives on Facebook was the digital equivalent of an archaeological excavation into the making of a person, but it seemed to be mostly absent from the friends I made in India, whose profiles I’d go through after making new friends to try and unearth the kind of person that they were. I cannot pinpoint the reason for this, and the vastly different childhoods may have had a role to play too. I did notice, however, my usage of Facebook plummet after moving to India. One reason was, of course, new friends not being on the platform, but the other reason was that my move coincided with the rise of multiple alternate social media platforms, most notably Instagram and WhatsApp, and the fact that boomers, old teachers, my parents, relatives and other adults joined Facebook, which didn’t make it much of a safe space anymore. I used a lot of Snapchat at one point, then Kik messenger, Tumblr, had a brief stint with Line messaging, but Instagram and WhatsApp continue to this day, although I do find myself favouring Twitter and Discord more these days.
The present day Facebook is an affront to its predecessor. Completely overrun by advertisements and paid promotions, clickbait-y titles fighting for screen space in order to appease the algorithmic gods and show up on top of your screen. I tried using the desktop version of the site, and I literally could not see the first post shown on my feed. But I digress, I’m not here to talk about the terrible UX of the site (something that’s a case study in itself).
I still use Facebook today, much more than what I’ve noticed from my peers, but my use case has changed drastically. None of my friends post anything on the site anymore, and some of the people that do, I’ve muted, because let’s be honest here, if someone is still using the site for unironically sharing things, they’re not really worth looking at. I presently use it only for the groups. Almost every niche or fandom that I subscribe to seems to have a shitposting group on Facebook, and this community-run source of memes and discussions has a much higher signal-to-noise ratio compared to individually run pages on Facebook or even Instagram an Twitter.
All that being said, Facebook doesn’t seem to be slowing down and is trying to stay relevant by constantly reinventing itself, but in doing so, is trading out, part-by-part, every aspect of it that once made it likeable, a Ship-of-Theseus style experiment that begs the question, how much of Facebook can you take out and replace before it ceases to be what it once was when it started out?
Updates This Week:
Apologies for not sending out an issue last week. In my defence, I had been really busy with pressing matters to be really able to devote my time to something else. The matters in question were:
Long-time readers will remember that I received this 1000 piece behemoth as a birthday present back in April, but quickly abandoned because I could not dedicate to it the necessary time…until this week (also it helps being unemployed). Channelling the grit and determination of Captain Ahab, I made it my lifelong (week-long) mission to tame this white whale, and from the depths of haphazard disarray, managed to bring together all the scattered pieces and finally vanquished the beast, whose deadly attacks of “does this blue piece belong to the sky or to the door” had befuddled scholars (my cousins) for centuries (for like half an hour before we decided to play Uno instead).
In a cruel twist of fate, however, I could not take complete satisfaction in the completion of the puzzle, because, if you noticed from the picture, there seemed to be 6 pieces missing, lost forever to the depths of the ocean, and try as hard as I did, I could not seem to find them again. Alas, such was the price I had to pay to appease the jigsaw gods to aid me in my quest.Completed Hades, the best game of 2020, and the replayability factor is so good that I’m still excited to play on and uncover the post-main storyline unlockable character arcs and collectibles (I usually never 100% a game after beating it)
After watching the new Dune trailer, i finally took the plunge and started reading the books. I’m a few chapters in and it seems amazing so far. It helps that, thanks to the trailer, I now have a face to attach to all the major characters to, so I’m not forgetting them easily (something that seems to happen to me a lot when reading anything with a lot of characters involved)
In other news, I traveled to Delhi last week to submit the documents for my study visa, so now I can officially travel to the Netherlands next month. Yay! (Get ready for this newsletter to turn into an unofficial travelogue as I nauseatingly turn into a tourist for a few weeks, taking photos of local flora and roads and pretending I’m having an epiphany looking at them)
Stuff I’m Listening To:
This Sarah Kinsley playlist:
Links of the Week:
That’s it for this week!
Raef