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This might be your elite user opinion.
My mother, a great grandmother in her 80s, is from another world. Despite being in a household with computers since the 1990s, she has never been able to use computers to do anything.
I tried to teach her once to use a desktop PC and she picked up the mouse and waved it around in the air, confused. She never figured out web browsers or email.
When cell phones had SMS, she ... never once sent a message. Same with smartphones really.
But what she is able to use is Facebook on an iPad. Not perfectly, she still gets into trouble and needs tech support from time to time (gets lost in a deep tree of settings menus and can't figure out how to get back to her timeline, or gets logged out and can't remember how to log back in).
And I tell you every tech company in the world can burst into flames right now and she would not give a fuck so long as Facebook kept working. Facebook connects her to a steady drip of pictures of her cute grandkids and in touch with life updates from her extended family and it is literally all that matters. The entire computer revolution has been a useless gimmick to her, except for Facebook. Facebook is the only thing SV has done that has brought her actual joy.
I suspect for at least a billion people Facebook is great.
But if you're at all tech savvy it's a cringe wasteland and you keep in touch some other way.
Nevertheless, I think it's an enduring contribution. It makes computers actually useful, even joyful, to a whole mass of humanity that had been left out.
That is how I used to feel about Facebook until around 2019 and I am in my 20s. Everyone I know was actively on it and all the social events were organized using it. I fondly remember throwing house parties with Facebook events or having an active feed where actual friends and family would both share wholesome photos but also their opinions about stuff or music etc. I could post anything I found interesting and expect a bunch of comments and chatter about it. Picture/video/algorithm based social media is such a bad replacement in comparison.
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That’s the sad thing. It could have been that for everyone. My parents don’t get to see their cute grandkids on Facebook because I’m not there. All they see is AI bullshit and insane political opinions. Facebook could have been great. But Zuckerberg murdered it.
I agree Facebook is not as great as it could be, and I consider myself forced to use Facebook to provide the cute stream of grandkid pics to my mom.
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