The original Facebook was something we’ll never get back

Years ago it was really interesting, could follow all my friends and see what they were up to. Now it's ads, suggested content and sometimes, accidentally, I can see some uninteresting post from someone I barely know

My feed is aware of my politics and throws everyone I'm friends with or follow (and some who I've unfollowed) who wrote something objectively wrong or stupid that's biased the other way politically.
It's literally all rage bait unless I go in and manually block it from showing me those people at all.
- I went back to watch my Facebook since years and I scrolled and scrolled. 24 sponsored posts before seeing a post from someone that I knew! And it was a post from someone out of the country who did a 1 week workshop with me ten years ago (=someone that I barely know). Next post is from a schoolmate after 21 sponsored posts. Need to-scroll through another 21 sponsored posts to find another real post. Again from someone who I barely know (the teacher of that workshop where I went ten years ago)
  How can people enjoy this shit? They actually enjoy watching ads?

The original Facebook was just "hot or not" for a college campus, and required invites.

Yeah; my reaction to the headline was “…and good riddance?”
I never signed up for Facebook in the first place because I knew some of the people involved in the original Facebook. I didn’t want them getting their hands on my personal info because I knew what they’d do with it… and they did.

That's because it was in it's money-losing "growth" phase. The Facebook we have today was always the point.

The only correction i'd do to this message is to stop calling this person "Zuck", Mark Zuckerberg IS NOT YOUR FRIEND, stop calling these fucking bastards cutesy friend names or on a first name basis (like "Elon", Zuck" and others like this) , they DO NOT deserve them and they WANT to be called that

The whole "one individual talking to another" aspect of the internet of the 00s is gone. It feels more and more like an "everyone is talking to you and hearing you, like it or not". Facebook is only an example of that - and even if it didn't enshittify, I find unlikely that it would've kept that aspect.

I also wonder if my experiences with Orkut wouldn't be similar to the ones of the author with FB, if only Google didn't kill Orkut. (It was a big thing here.)

It's not gone, it has gone underground, i like this model to describe the current internet
- My peeve with the illustration there is that it shows the dark forest (adtech shit and bots) as separate from the cozy web (chat streams like discord, slack, whatsapp), because said streams are largely run by the dark forest.
- That's a great analogy. And a fair point - it got burrowed, but it's still there.
  At least when we deal with individuals using the platform. The platform is still listening to you, and sharing it with advertisers; that's the whole model behind Meta (WhatsApp) and Snapchat. They're still hearing you, and want to talk with you (shhh, I've heard you bought [product]? Here are some offers for even more [product]!), regardless of what you want.

Don't forget it also created a 5-10 year period of otherwise-tech-illiterate ditsy chicks with comm or marketing degrees rebranding themselves as "Social Media Marketing Expert", because they knew what buttons to click in Facebook UI.

Hey, don't be sexist. There's plenty of otherwise-tech-illiterate ditsy dudes in the same work pool.
Cringe
Defrauding corporations sounds like praxis to me.