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by pessimizer1 hours ago |
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upvoteby iamacyborg1 hours ago|
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> It was never any better than Myspace, and gradually got much worse.

I might be misremembering a bunch but myspace never had a feed that showed you your friend’s updates.

It also wasn’t able to magically show you the people who were at that random house party you went to the night before that you hit it off with but were too drunk to get their number.

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upvoteby IshKebab1 hours ago|
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Facebook didn't have the feed initially either (and it was really disliked when it was introduced - people thought it was like stalking). But yes to your second point. Real people who you actually wanted to know and had actually met were on Facebook. That wasn't really true of any of the other sites.
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upvoteby smeej26 minutes ago|
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Little did we know back then how many people were yearning to have stalkers. "This person wants to be notified every time I put something online" sounded incredibly creepy in the mid-aughts!
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upvoteby IshKebab1 hours ago|
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> Did you miss Myspace and Friendster?

MySpace was a) awful, b) only used by a tiny tiny fraction of people (1% maybe), and c) rarely had people's real names & photos on it. Not remotely comparable to Facebook. Even fewer people used Friendster and Orkut, at least in the UK.

> I have no idea what you think is or was so great about WhatsApp. It was successful largely because it had no overhead and infinite throughput

Free. No ads. Reliable. E2E encryption. Group chats. Cross platform. There's so much that's great about it. It was successful because the alternative was SMS which was shit. I'm guessing you're American.

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