a little story about some guys from the past (i.e. 2014)
These guys were like me: they were on Facebook. And they got into a discussion about the topic of Facebook, in a way I thought was unhelpful to the discussion, but was just my fault anyway.
This is a picture of me and the original poster – I’m a little dude with a blue t-shirt with a big flower in it, and the original poster was some guy with white-and-gray hair.
We were posting in the “Newest Stuff” section. New Stuff is where the Facebook algorithm shows you what your friends have recently posted; it’s full of posts about the latest news.
So the original poster posted something like “I have no idea why I’m doing this. Facebook does not help me stay organized.” And then a bunch of people reblogged it with “Facebook does help me stay organized!”
The rest of the Facebook group was having this discussion with the guy on the left of this picture, who responded with “It’s true! Facebook is helping me stay organized!”
He also posts a lot of pictures of cute animals. He has a pet wolf that he spends a lot of time looking at.
My friend was responding with “That’s what I meant by ‘organized’. The reason I use Facebook is to stay organized.”
And then the rest of us were kind of annoyed by this whole exchange. I think my friend also ended up taking the screenshot of me to prove a point about something else.
So I wanted to bring this back to the fore. Because it was interesting to me as a reflection of how we felt about Facebook.
(It’s also interesting because people talk about the algorithm all the time these days, but I don’t see too much stuff about it outside of Facebook. If this were, say, 2011, people would’ve been using Facebook to complain about how their friends and family are always posting “relevant” content; they’d have been talking about how there are no pictures of cute animals that are “relevant” to their lives, except for some very few pictures of some cute animals. But I don’t think that was much of an issue then; I haven’t noticed it now. Now, my friends and family aren’t any more likely to post pictures of cute animals than they were in 2011. Facebook doesn’t help them to stay organized, and the Facebook algorithm doesn’t help me to stay organized, either. The main changes have been elsewhere.)
