So Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp (all Facebook properties) were all down today. As with the trend lately, there was a lot of widespread dunking on Facebook all day. Facebook certainly has its problems, but it’s nothing really new. A lot of folks make hay about how toxic it is, and how it algorithmically is going to ruin society. This seems to come off as a bit of hyperbole from my perspective.

Like I said, Facebook certainly has its problems. But these are not new problems. Amplifying voices and propagating misinformation and driving people into the armpits of discourse are all things that have been around since the general public has been on the Internet. In some areas, Facebook and other SNSs optimize this a bit. However, the real culprit here isn’t these services. Or at least not directly. It really boils down these services just facilitating something we’re already been doing for a while, and that’s just outsourcing our own ability for critical thinking, judgement, and curiosity to companies looking to offload that for us.

A few years ago I probably would’ve been a part of the same crowd participating in the circle-jerk of dunking. However as time has passed I’ve come to realize that there’s utility to these services especially after the past (almost) two years of lockdown. Even though my usage of Facebook has dropped over the past few years, I still like the connection to some of my more “online” family members. Plus my father (a technology neophyte who’s not even a fan of feature phones), recently started using it, and it’s amusing to see him liking my random posts, and chat about some of the more absurd things one there over phone calls.

Likewise while I don’t use WhatsApp, I do enjoy the ‘Gram quite a bit. There’s several communities spread around the world that I participate in that use Instagram quite heavily. I’m not sure how well I would be involved or get to know people otherwise as what is essentially a visual Twitter seems to be most approachable manner in which these interests coagulate into (of the small groups I follow and chat with, I think of the Japanese moto-vloggers and housing DIY’ers, a small circle of Korean fashion bloggers, and fountain pen and stationary enthusiasts). There’s other larger, broader groups and interests, but those are more generic and have wider venues to browse (watches, synthesizers, cameras, etc.).

In any case, since I was busy with work, so the outage really didn’t affect me all that much. But it was kind of depressing to see people (who claim not to use said services) shit all over it and act like the world would be better off without them (I mean I can think of a lot of worse things than Facebook). Anyway, that’s pretty much about it. Just felt a little bit irked about the reactions to today’s outage.