I remember the first few years of facebook (back when you had to have a university email address to sign up) and I genuinely think it was a positive, value-added-to-the-world kind of experience. I had good friends on there and we would share things, discuss different topics, and in general just interact with each other in a way we weren't able to before. There wasn't even a "news feed"; you just visited someone's page and looked at what they had posted or posted something there yourself that you thought they would appreciate.<p>Facebook is nothing like that anymore, and while there's certainly a lot that's changed, I think there are two specific things that turned it into what it is now.<p>1) Every single thing you do; posting videos, sharing your thoughts via text, leaving comments, joining a group, etc. runs on a point system. Everything is scored via "likes", and not only do <i></i>you<i></i> evaluate how good a post was based on the score it receives, but Facebook does too. The higher the score the higher your post will appear in other people's feeds and the more friends it will be shown to. Facebook even shows a post to a subset of your friends to judge how well it will perform, and if it receives a lot of likes it will be pushed out to a broader audience. You are, quite literally, playing a game.<p>Not only does that change your value system from "hey I found something that <friend> would like and I'm going to share it with them so we can talk about it" to "hey I found something that will get me a lot of points"; it also means that trivial content rises to the top. Cat pictures are kinda-neat to everyone but not extremely meaningful to anyone, while a thoughtful post on a specific topic probably doesn't appeal to everyone, but it will mean a lot to a few people. But with the one-vote-per-person rule, the thoughtful post gets buried.<p>2) Advertisements displace real content. YouTube, for all it's other flaws, has a very straightforward ad model. Ads essentially just piggyback on videos. If you make a really good video that means that lots of people will want to watch it, lots of ads can be shown, you get lots of views, and all three parties are happy without interfering with each other's interests. With Facebook, ads don't piggyback on other content, they replace it. If you are a company and you want to advertise yourself, you make a post and then pay have Facebook show it to more people and place it higher in their news feeds. Real content gets pushed down. And what's worse, there's no real distinction between ads and content. I believe you can even pay to boost your own posts, even as a normal user.<p>I think that there are going to be problems with any social platform, but Facebook is gross. It's a social game that exploits people's natural behaviors and ways of thinking, and does it without them realizing it to make a profit.