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Why Reddit Is Destined to Turn to Crap
(www.motherjones.com)
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Exactly. I should use this moment to reflect on how many Facebook “friends” are “must have” folks I should put effort into keeping in touch with outside of FB, and then I should…do that.
But one thing I admit would be tough would be giving up on the possibility (more of a fantasy at this point) of popping into FB for a feeling…for of a general sense of what folks I know are up to. Where they are, what they’re enjoying, what they’re struggling with, etc. Do I need to know how my middle school acquaintance’s cancer treatment is going? Do I need to see pictures of a former coworkers’ dogs frolicking at doggie daycare? Well, no; I maintain my circle of close friends and family without Facebook and can continue to do so. But there was a time FB seemed to provide a sense of being at least casually plugged into a wider community of acquaintances and more distant relatives that I liked and enjoyed. I don’t think we’re ever really going to get that back.
Maybe losing that peculiar late-00s-early-teens sense of a network of real people you kinda care about even if you’re not close is a good thing. Maybe Facebook only ever provided a false sense of community that made us over-invested in near-strangers’ dramas; maybe it pulled us away from face-to-face community building with our actual neighbors. I dunno! Regardless, I’m reluctant to discard it entirely if only because I’m pretty sure we’ll never again see a mass “(almost) everyone is going to gather on this one platform, under their real names, and be at least somewhat reachable through it.”
@Suedeltica So, I've been around for what is turning out to be a long time now, and I can tell you that pre-web-based internet, I used to BBS a lot. And the fun thing there was we were online with people within our long-distance calling range basically. So we had that early sense of online community, but with people we eventually ended up meeting up with in real life once we got old enough to drive and be unsupervised and stuff. And the BBS's are long, LONG gone now, but these are some of the people I'm actually RL closest with to this day. So I guess I'm saying, yeah, the networks they come and go, and the people come and go too, but we do end up keeping the ones who really matter. FB isn't the first to disappear, and it won't be the last. The world changes so much, and there will be something new eventually. There always is.