Facebook reduce your lifetime

Are you willing to take the red pill and wake up from the grip of Facebook? or Meta, as they like to be called nowadays? The future of human interaction with Meta is about to slip into a more dystopian world than Facebook did in the past.

If you read this, you probably asked me why I do not have Facebook. Here is your answer.

The old times

I spent a lot of time in my youth conversing with Internet people. At that time, the data generated by people was not yet monetized, conversing with each other through direct messaging software such as IRC, Skype, or MSN Messenger. As far as I know, it represented most of the time people spent online in 2000 years.

I was also big on the P2P using Kazaa and Emule, pushing my ADSL 256k. I was always curious and eager to discover new technology, spending most of my time doing web programming or Linux administration as a hobby.

From 2000 to 2005, someone made a lot of money online, and that's Google with their ADs service. I worked for people running a wallpapers website and a gaming forum where they put many ads to monetize the traffic. That was very lucrative initially because there was little concurrence and online marketing was not a thing.

It was traffic monetization without specific measures to know who viewed the ADs. Bot started flooding the web, and more mechanisms developed, but still, there was no user identification associated.

Online advertising revenue in the United States from 2000 to 2021 (in billion U.S. dollars)

source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/183816/us-online-advertising-revenue-since-2000/

Early adopter

I opened my Facebook account in 2007, and never liked it from day one! I first intended to use it only with my closest friend and family to share personal photos, as It was designed to be a private social network.

I was not too fond of the orchestration of friends' suggestions pushing pressure to have more and more friends. Receiving friend invitations from people you don't know or are not close enough to be in your first circle was a pain in the ass. People start to contest for having the most friends possible and, at some point, lose the original idea of a private social network.

The fall of MySpace

Day after day, MySpace and all other small social platform started to be eaten one by one. Facebook became bigger and bigger and the network effect start to kick in. Network effect refers to the increase of value in the service as more and more users use it every day. Any marketplace and c2c platform would dream of a network effect as strong as Facebook.

Time for $cash

In 2008 Facebook Page and Ads lift-off. Infinite scroll with pre-select content keep your wall full of information was a top priority. Every page was a fill a new set of Ads.

The more time you spend on Facebook and the more money they can make. All the information you share during the past month or year, your group, favorite movie, and books. All of that becomes the new digital gold for better Ads targets to be the most accurate possible.

You know it by now, if it's free, you are the product.

Facebook has been built to be Addictive. Maybe it didn't work on me because I'm an introvert, but Sean Parker (Napster founder) and Former first Facebook president, once said:

The thought process was all about, How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible? And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever, and that’s going to get you to contribute more content, and that’s going to get you more likes and comments. It’s a social validation feedback loop. You’re exploiting a vulnerabilty in human psychology.

Cambridge Analytica scandal

That story made the headline many times, and you probably know it. Arround 2010 Facebook release the Open Graph to execute FQL query to retrieve informations. The same year, I created a website for SATA, a local Magazine.

They had their private group with a lot of photos from different events. During the website conception, we got the idea to embed all the photos from Facebook, but unfortunately, it was private and cannot be retrieved.

As I started to dig into the Facebook Application permissions, I discovered that I could retrieve information from the private page and friend's details. This is how I managed to extract private photos from Facebook and put them on the website. It was a terrible idea and a total personal information infringement. It runs for two years before closing.

Cambridge Analytica did pretty much the same but with the Facebook authorization of processing friends' data without the approval of the application by the user directly. By doing so, you could easily iterate from friend to friend and extract all information you would like.

The future of Facebook

Social networks are generational, Gen Z and Alpha didn't wait long to find a new destructive network to hook on. Tik-Toc has been under the spotlight for a few years, Zuckerberg say's he wants to be known as the person that invented the Metaverse where your digital YOU can live.

From Zuck vision, and knowing what has been done by Facebook we can expect them to build a platform where people will immerge themself 10 hours a day, with a Headset on their head and playing Farmville VR while seeing virtual Ads in 4 dimensions. Not for me!

Tell your kids to become psychiatrists if they want to help people because mental health disorders will become increasingly severe!