It is true that it was started as a way to connect people, and I remember the excitement of finding out whether the old classmate got married, the colleague got fired, or the ex-boyfriend got uglier.
But it also got old pretty quickly, like lunches with ex-colleagues: the first one is interesting and lively, the second one is forced, and when they call us for the third one we say we're sorry, but we just ate a pangolin at the wet market.
To keep engagement high, other activities on Facebook were needed, so groups, news, marketplace, etc. A simplified view, sure, but novelty wears off, and that is especially true and noticeable for fast-growing platforms, sports, tourist spots that cause feverish excitement.
Tbh I am not that quickly to get bored (and neither are many many other people, not all humanity has OCD), and FB would still work very fine for me if it kept to its core mission (and maybe more stability since it was by far the worst working web app from all the big ones).
But social aspect went south as soon as it became big business, feed stopped being chronological, it kept (and still keeps to me) randomly refreshing and reshuffling and since beginning of covid it is full of ads and sponsored content that I couldn't care less about and annoys me to no end. When core sucks more and more no amount of glitter wrapping and psychology/addiciton-driven design makes it even as good as original.
And on meeting former colleagues, it simply boils down whether its a proper friendship or not. Clearly your description falls into "not" category.
The park of Facebook that I was really in to was being able to store all the information about my social life. Tagging photos, making journal entries, checking in at locations, keeping track of birthdays and whatnot.
Before all the newsfeed stuff it was a pure reflection of who I was and who I surrounded myself with and it was glorious.
> we're sorry, but we just ate a pangolin at the wet market.
rofl.
I meet ex-colleagues for lunch every now and then. It ain't that bad... But I mean it depends. There's also a lot of ex-colleagues I never see again. Some are more like friends, some less.
I don't agree with this assessment. Instagram today is rather close to the Facebook back in the day. It does not have groups, marketplace, news (unless you follow a news agency), etc. And it is very popular.
It is similar in terms of the user demographics to Facebook back in the day, but the revealed preferences of the users and way of using the social media are not similar at all.
But it also got old pretty quickly, like lunches with ex-colleagues: the first one is interesting and lively, the second one is forced, and when they call us for the third one we say we're sorry, but we just ate a pangolin at the wet market.
To keep engagement high, other activities on Facebook were needed, so groups, news, marketplace, etc. A simplified view, sure, but novelty wears off, and that is especially true and noticeable for fast-growing platforms, sports, tourist spots that cause feverish excitement.