We Should Replace Facebook With Personal Websites (vice.com)

Jason Koebler from Motherboard argues "we should replace Facebook with personal websites." An anonymous reader shares the report: As a freshman in high school, in the year of our lord 2002, I made a website called "Jason's Site." While a website named after myself and devoted to updates about my own life was unspeakably vain for the time, it was also quite forward looking: The site has a news feed, an "about me" page, and an email mailing list for people to receive updates. I intended for it to be funded by reader donations. It had a section for Flash videos and photos, a guestbook, and a "friends" page that was literally a list of my friends. It had an ill-advised but nonetheless prescient "hot or not" section that featured photos of my friends and acquaintances and predated both Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg's original idea for the social network, called "FaceMash." I updated the site regularly and obsessively for about three months, and then never returned to it. The site was embarrassing then and is embarrassing now, but abandoning it was a terrible mistake.

Facebook gets a lot of credit for "disrupting" social media and for turning MySpace into a worthless piece of garbage, but millions upon millions of teenagers and young adults were already sharing every aspect of their lives on other social networks, and on their own websites. Facebook had the good fortune of being new, slightly different, and exclusive. It was even luckier to come to power shortly before the rise of the smartphone. I guess what I'm saying is that Facebook isn't really all that much better or more convenient than having your own website, or sending emails or chats. But for some reason, Facebook (and Instagram) are where we post now. Facebook has of course become something much larger than a single website, and has, despite its flaws, "helped connect the world" for better or worse. But Facebook tapped into a trend that was already happening -- it didn't invent the idea of letting people put stuff about their lives online, it just monetized it better.

Comments

You mean go back to how it was?

[bobbied]

LOL.. Replace Facebook with personal websites eh? Isn't that how this whole internet thing got started back when I was in college?

Re:You mean go back to how it was?

[lactose99]

We should bring the <blink> tag back too

Re:You mean go back to how it was?

[XxtraLarGe]

When I need to tell people how long I've been making websites, I say "I've been doing this since frames were the hot new thing!"

LOL! One of my students in my web programming class was having a problem with an embedded style sheet. I looked at it and noticed she was missing a semicolon in one of her styles. I pointed it out to her immediately and she said in amazement "How long have you been doing this?" and I said "Since before you were born." I think she's a sophomore, makes me feel OLD.

Re:IndieWeb & Interoperable Online Communities

[DogDude]

Your web site doesn't work.

Re:IndieWeb & Interoperable Online Communities

[forkfail]

First website to be /.ed in a decade.

Good idea but..

[110010001000]

...but we should add the personal websites under a single domain so people can go there to find them and search them easily. We could call it mypage.com or something.

Re:Could still be standardized

[110010001000]

We COULD, but who would design it, build it, market it and maintain it? Not me, I'm too busy posting nonsense on Slashdot.

FB needs to be socialized

[wolfheart111]

Socialism, FB needs to be run by the government. For many its a essential service...