The future of how we socialize online is being defined as we speak, and it’s far too important to leave things to the likes of Meta and other mega social companies. Just a surface-level look at Meta’s history is enough to understand its tendency to severely miss the mark.
Some companies like to use Web3 principles to right the wrongs of Web2. And as a poster child for large, centralized organizations, Meta offers us some of the most useful examples of those wrongs.
Let’s touch on three times that Meta fell short of building the future of online social experiences.
It limited Open Graph
In 2010, Meta — still operating as Facebook at the time — released its “Open Graph” protocol, providing developers with a network of links between friends in order to encourage other people to take up its apps. It was a way for users to carry their Facebook identities from app to app, making it easy for developers to give those users a personalized experience. However, a few years later, the company shifted gears to become ruthless in cutting off friends, its newsfeed and other data access for developers.
The primary reason for this was to limit competition, as Facebook was worried about people reverse-engineering its social graphs and creating their own versions of Facebook. So, it ended up killing a product that many in the community nowadays call essential. It was ahead of its time — until it stopped making business sense.
Facebook felt that it was arming its competitors by giving them this data, and with its centralized power, Facebook had the unilateral ability to dramatically cut off this access.
It took the @Metaverse Instagram handle from the user who registered it
Online social identities are of great importance to users — they represent who you are and bear the weight of your effort and time spent online. So, when Facebook rebranded itself as Meta, getting a new logo and image, a situation with social media handles presented an unanticipated problem.
Related: Facebook and Twitter will soon be obsolete thanks to blockchain technology
An active Instagram user who had already registered @metaverse as her username was already regularly sharing photos from that handle. Then, without warning, Meta blocked her account. When that story came to light, it resulted in some predictably negative press for the social media giant.
Transparency and ownership are core values of the emergent decentralized paradigm. Social platforms of the future will be designed in such…
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