![]() ![]() That is to say, a News Feed full of other people’s nostalgia is ultimately as boring as being subjected to a slide show of someone’s summer vacation used to be. And worse, if content is king, the memories-driven throne is pretty shriveled. So, on the one hand, Memories has started to feel gross-tainted by all the things that have tainted Facebook in general. We’ve got to assume that every time you choose to repost a memory, you’re signaling its importance in some way, and all of that is getting added to that mysterious profile on you that you can’t quite access or get control over, but that’s being used to target ads to you with uncanny precision. It certainly adds to the pile of information about you. So at some point, the platform will start to lose value even as a resurfacing agent-after all, what good are the memories I’ve already seen a hundred times?įacebook turned memory into an economy because it seemed to work, in the short term. ![]() I don’t want my son to be consumed by the robots, and I’ve pulled farther and farther away from Facebook myself. In fact, on a memory I shared back in January, I’d written, “These might be the only reason I'm still ON Facebook, really.”īut even that won’t last, because I’m no longer feeding the beast. In fact, I went and looked at my profile as I was contemplating this column, and wouldn’t you know it, nearly everything there was either a memory I’d reposted, a memory someone else had posted that I’m tagged in, or an assortment of articles that people had tagged me on so I’d be sure to see them. Me, though? I’ve got nothing to say, except on the off chance there’s a cute memory (usually something related to my kid) that I want to re-up. Now, when I go there, it’s because I want to post something promotional to my public page (sorry), or maybe check in on some (sorry) older relatives who still use it to tell me what they’re up to. At some point, I started to realize that I was out of things I actually wanted to share with Facebook. (Triviality does not seem to be a disqualifying filter, leading to another question apparently unasked at Facebook: Just because it happened, do I need to remember it?)īut here’s the thing. Facebook is using artificial intelligence to determine whether a given memory might actually be a bummer, a good memory gone bad, a photo of a deceased person with a memorial page on the site, or something along those lines. That’s right, your nostalgia is now being used to train the machines. ![]() These days, Memories is newer and more improved with more AI. It would show you exes and dead relatives and horrible news events until it became sort of a dark joke how often it backfired, and the company slowly added filters and controls so you could exclude things from it or turn it off altogether. People were visiting Facebook, but they weren’t posting, and this 2016 piece from The Information cites “On This Day” as one of many tools the platform rolled out to juice people into sharing more. And shortly after that milestone, Facebook copied it almost feature for feature, down to the colors of the edges of the photos, according to its creators.Īs it happens, by 2015, Facebook was already aware that original sharing on the platform was in a steep decline. (It’s still around, by the way I think I might try it!) People loved it. See, around 2015, an app called Timehop had hit 6 million users by pulling in photos and posts from across the web and aggregating them into memories. Obviously, this was not supposed to happen.
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