When Facebook was relatively new, that's exactly what its users (including me) did. In many ways, it was a better short-blogging platform than LiveJournal, and many us of left to enjoy the future of personal sharing.<p>Then, over time, Facebook added new kinds of content to the News Feed, and added one-click re-sharing. People eventually found it easier to just click mouse buttons than make their own statements.<p>Next, they started curating people's News Feeds, selecting the content Facebook thought was important, instead of showing a raw stream of their friends' updates. Personal updates were squelched; linkbait and social gaming (Zynga, anyone?) were promoted.<p>To make matters worse, they stopped allowing subscribers to control their own News Feeds' content. Sure, you could hide updates from certain posters, or express a vague preference to "hide content like this" (whatever that means), but you could only do that one item at a time. There was never a way to control the News Feed to filter out everything but personal content. As a consequence of these maneuvers, Facebook expressed a clear business preference to keep people engaged through low-quality, quick-dopamine-hit content.<p>And those who continued to try to use Facebook as they'd done before noticed these changes. Their "Like" counts went down. People stopped commenting. In fact it became clear that perhaps what they were posting -- even party invitations -- were never being seen by their friends at all.<p>So, it's natural that people stopped posting personal updates. For many, if Facebook isn't going to guarantee that your friends see them, taking the time to write starts to seem like wasted effort. And that's exactly what it felt like for me.<p>So, now Facebook wants us to post more about ourselves. But they created this problem. If they want to solve it, they already know how, because the site made it a great place to do so 10 years ago. But I doubt that they will, because it conflicts too strongly with their profit motive.