Facebook put us out there

In February 2004, a 19-year-old, flip-flop-wearing Mark Zuckerberg released an online directory of Harvard students. In those days, the internet still felt small. It was mostly about finding webpages, not people.

It turned out that the internet was very good for connecting people. More than 1,000 Harvard students signed up for TheFacebook.com in the first 24 hours. The site started spreading quickly by word of mouth around campus. By the end of 2004, dozens of other colleges were on Facebook. The site had 1 million monthly users. Myspace’s user base was about five times larger, though not for long.

Social media predated Facebook, but nothing had captured the magic of what Zuckerberg and his classmates hacked together. The 2004 version of Facebook was extremely basic, which worked in its favor. There was the ability to search for someone and see everything they elected to share about themselves, which, in those early days, turned out to be a lot. You could send friend requests and, of course, pokes — the digital nudge that predated the like. 

The experience was voyeuristic in a way that, looking back, undoubtedly fueled its success. If you had an account in 2004, Facebook was a place full of people you knew from your school — or, in a lot of cases, desperately wanted to know. Facebook’s real name and .edu email policy meant that people couldn’t hide behind anonymity. We didn’t know yet what the implications of sharing our lives with the world would be. It felt new and exciting. 

I didn’t create a Facebook account until March 2008, two years after the launch of the News Feed, the always-updating feed of updates from friends that ended up being replicated all over the internet. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the concept of the News Feed, which Facebook initially released to user revolt, transformed how humans interact with one another. Connecting was no longer a one-to-one exchange. Now, it was a stream.

I remember being the first in my class with a profile, but not for long; I quickly convinced several of my friends to sign up. Facebook was nothing without the people you knew on it, after all. It became how we kept up with each other throughout the day, how we expressed who we wanted to be to the people around us, and perhaps most importantly, how we flirted with each other. Sending a friend request back then was the equivalent of sliding into someone’s DMs before there were DMs. 

Within a few years, it felt like everyone had showed up to Facebook: parents, teachers, siblings, and brands. Facebook was early at understanding that selling ads against engagement would be the best business model for a free service. Zuckerberg’s mission became to connect the world, and Facebook was able to fund that goal by building one of the most lucrative advertising machines in the history of humanity.

As money became more of a factor, what started as Facebook’s unique insight — that we want to communicate with the people we know online — started backfiring. As we aged but Facebook kept a record of our posts, we realized that a digital record of our personal lives could be used against us in countless ways. Being authentically yourself on Facebook once felt freeing; it eventually became a liability. 

Nowadays, I mostly experience Facebook through its Memories feature, which I sometimes still check after clearing the endless stream of notifications I mostly don’t care about. I usually delete everything in my profile’s history except for anything that’s particularly nostalgic. The further back, the more mundane the posts get. Fourteen years ago, you checked into Whole Foods using Gowalla. From 2005: am listening to Weezer. Stuff like that.

As silly as it feels to post stuff like that on the internet now, it’s nice to be reminded of a time when we shared more of ourselves with the people we actually knew. So much of social media has become more about the media than actually connecting with friends. Shortform video recommended by algorithms is more engaging and easier to monetize than posts meant for your close friends. 

This kind of connection still happens online, but it doesn’t happen on Facebook — or anywhere in public. Although he was a bit late to the trend, Zuckerberg himself acknowledged in 2019 that person-to-person conversations were shifting from the News Feed and its algorithm to chat threads. Conveniently, he had already paid $16 billion to acquire WhatsApp several years earlier.

That means the future of Facebook is increasingly disconnected from the things that made it successful 20 years ago. Meta executives say its purpose is now “social discovery,” a concept that has less to do with finding your close friends and more to do with finding new videos to watch. Zuckerberg more recently said that he expects AI-generated content to fill social media feeds, crowding out humans even further. Soon enough, it might feel like no one you know is on Facebook anymore. It might feel like there are no people left at all.