Last night I scrolled back to 2011 on my Facebook feed because I felt like rereading my accounts of my trip to France that year. And reading that, I thought "Wow, back when Facebook was fun."
What's wrong with Facebook now? For one thing, they've made it impossible NOT to miss anything. Once upon a time I made a point of scrolling through my newsfeed until I hit my most recent status - the mark that I'd seen everything my friends had posted. Can't do that now! "Top Stories" is an abortion (as Ignatius J. Reilly would say), but even "Most Recent" does not include 100% of posts from 100% of FB friends. And that's what I want, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.
Facebook also doesn't allow us to control settings enough to stop seeing things like posts from total strangers who are friends of FB friends, etc. "Manage what you see in your feed" includes no useful options.
And content-wise - and I am the first to admit that I'm part of the problem - it's gotten way too political. So many people only use FB to post links to new stories, and not always very thoughtful or responsible news stories either.
Aside from all that, I was interested to see how my style had evolved since then. Back in 2011 I still hadn't adopted my tripartite status update of three not-always-related items. I couldn't remember certain things that I had shared. (For instance, who was the old lady who was bothering me at the office that day? Does it matter?) A name appears in one of my statuses - and I can't remember who it was. Links to FB friends no longer appear in some statuses because they've left, deleted old profiles before adding a new one, or unfriended. I went to one person's profile, which was marked "Add Friend." And then I remembered "Oh right, I unfriended a couple years ago because we never interacted."
My question is: when FB has finally jumped the shark, where will be all go?