I hope that one day people will look back at this article and see a little piece of strange history.

And that they scratch their heads in disbelief!

A brief history

Back in the 1990’s people used BBSs. By the late 90s people had transitioned over on to the Internet and eventually bloggers followed each other’s RSS feeds. The feeds were nice and you could see everything in chronological order however there was no way for the average business owner or Grandma to share things or figure out how the hell to use an RSS reader let alone publish to the web. The natural evolution of this was Facebook who was simply in the right place at the right time. Of course, Facebook thinks they are genius. In addition to constantly screwing with everyone’s privacy they decided to ruin the feed.

First it was the business owners

Facebook was a fantastic way for business owners to connect with their followers. They posted an update and their followers would see the update in their feed chronologically. Everyone loved this. Then one day Facebook took the feature away. After years of business owners all over following Facebook’s advice of building their following there business owners had to now pay to get most of their updates out. Users hated this and business owners hated it as well. The stream became so unusable many of us such as myself simply left the platform even though it continued to grow by people who have lots of time on their hands or refused to leave either due to their infatuation of playing with their phone or feeling disconnected from their friends. Unfortunately, if you leave Facebook, you will indeed miss out on many social gatherings since many of your friends are there. However, in 2016, most teens, at least near me, do not use Facebook. Anyways..

Then it was the user’s streams

Facebook changed the stream. It was no longer chronological. In addition they kept changing the stream using various algorithms until nobody knew how to find out if their content was being seen or not. Then Google+ did the same thing. If you have ever tried to use Google+ you quickly learned that it is completely unusable. You can open the G+ app 15 times and see 15 completely different things in your stream anywhere from 2 minutes old to 48 hours old. It is like grabbing a book to read and just randomly opening to page 177 and getting a paragraph then going to page 64 for another and then over to page 198 for a sentence. The network was so unexplainable that only a handful of people ever used it. Then the others such as Twitter and Instagram began changing their feeds. You can introduce anyone to Twitter and they will be confused and lost, which is quite amazing as it used to be so simple. The latest has been Snapchat, quite possibly the most annoying to date. Now when you go to play a video on Snapchat or view a snap, the next person’s snap begins playing as soon as one ends.

So, that is where we are in 2106. Social media companies have a bizarre behavior of trying to force people to see random streams. Despite user’s outcry they continue. This is like turning on the TV and letting the cable company play for you what they think you should see. It is just very, very weird.

Len
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On May 8, 2016   /   Social Media   /   Leave a comment

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