When did Facebook stop being fun?

Over the weekend I was tooling around in the car listening to the radio. I turned up the volume when “Stoned Soul Picnic” by Laura Nyro came on. It reminded me of a fun night about a decade ago—back when Facebook was fun.

Facebook used to be fun—it really did. When it began—back in the old days—it was used as a way for college students across the nation to stay in touch and bond with each other. Pretty cool, right? Then their parents figured out that if they (we) joined, we could spy (stalk) on our kids to see what they were up to. Not so cool, right—actually a little creepy. But then we figured out that we could use Facebook to reconnect with people from our past—mostly high school and college classmates. And that’s what we did—and it was fun.

In many cases, we started reestablishing relationships with friends we had lost touch with and hadn’t seen in decades. We also established relationships with people we had heard of but didn’t know, and some of those became close friends.

Facebook was being used to do fun things. And here comes some of the fun part:

On a late Saturday night, maybe about a decade ago, some former high school classmates were hanging out on Facebook, talking about music. Someone had mentioned Laura Nyro, how her life was tragically cut short by cancer, and what a great legacy her catalog of songs had left. Then, they played one of her tunes. Next, someone played another of her songs. A third person found another one and so on. It went on for about an hour.

It was so much fun that another night we did it with Steely Dan. My daughter came across this in her FB searches (stalks?). When I told her someone had started it and I just jumped on the bandwagon, she said “With Steely Dan, I thought you’d be the leader of that bandwagon.”

Those are just a couple of examples of how cool it was in the olden days of Facebook. It was great to see pictures of friends and their families, especially their grandchildren. There was even bonding when someone in our Facebook clique became ill or died. Yeah, it was sad, but the support was comforting.

I’m not exactly sure when all the above changed, but a majority of it was because of politics. It seemed to begin in the final years of the Obama administration and increased big time during the Trump-Hillary Clinton campaign. And man, did it get worse during the four years of Donald’s regime. I’ll take my share of the blame for this—sorry—sort of. It continues to this day.

It led to a lot of people closing their Facebook accounts. Some went to Instagram, some went to the former Twitter, now X, and others left social media completely.

I’m going to admit something:

I don’t like what Facebook has become but I’m still here because it’s a good place to share my writing. I get more responses from Facebook than I do from all the other social media sites combined. And, I also like to show off pictures of my grandchildren because they’re damn cute. If it weren’t for these two things, I’d be long gone.

But here’s the thing that bothers me more than the politics—the algorithm isn’t showing me what I want to see. Out of my close to one thousand friends—both real and imagined—I only see what a couple of handfuls of them post regularly. I’m bombarded with ads from things I never heard of. There’s also the targeted marketing things that are just as annoying. This week Facebook thinks I care about children’s books publishers, pizza and shoes. Yeah, I do care about those things but when they’re the things you see the most, it’s overkill—and certainly not fun.

I long for those good old days of Facebook. At a time when we’re more divided than ever before, we want to have some mindless fun wherever we can get it. Too bad it doesn’t look like it will ever be on Facebook again.