Today in the series “How the time flies!” Facebook, the social network that was the predecessor of the term, the first one that managed to attract all types of users and which today, despite its many shadows, is still the most used in the world, and not only that, it always ranks in the top 5 most visited pages of the website in the world. According to the December 2023 ranking, the most recent, only Google and YouTube ranked above the social network.

In these 20 years of history, the image of Facebook, and thus the habits of using the social network, have changed significantly. After the beginnings, when it was aimed exclusively at students from various universities, the service opened up to all users interested in using it and began to grow exponentially, based mainly on the recommendations of the users themselves, which made it seem possible at times. to regain contact with practically all the people who have passed through our lives at one time or another and with a greater or lesser presence.

I usually call those times as phase of innocence. There was still no clear and widespread awareness of the importance of privacy or the value of personal data. It was very difficult to explain to people that sooner or later Facebook would start monetizing said information, and ordinary mortals published personal content exposed to many prying eyes without realizing that they were losing control over it.

Seen through today’s prism, it was clearly a collective folly.. To this day, I still remember finding profiles of strangers in which I could get enough information to write a complete biography and document it with all kinds of photographic material. I’ll admit that I uploaded more content than I would have uploaded today (I don’t actually upload anything on social media these days), but there were people who didn’t hesitate to share.

The good part is that It meant a revolution in personal relationships. On the one hand, it made it easier to re-establish contact with many people with whom the passage of time, distance and life had separated. From reconnecting with school friends to finding, decades later, that friend who lived in the same building as you and played with every afternoon, but who you lost touch with a long time ago.

Except, It has also become a very interesting tool for socializing.. In my case, I met a few people through Facebook a few years ago. with part of which I even went on vacation several times. Heck, I even started meeting a person with whom a spark of love could arise. It didn’t work out in the end, but we met a few times for coffee.

But then came the big scandal. Before that, there were more and more voices warning about Facebook’s privacy risks, but it was with the Cambridge Analytica scandal when negative evaluations began to spread, and in this regard the discovery of security flaws and extreme laxity in protecting user privacy played a very important role. At this point, it’s not that users stop publishing content so easily, which many have started doing before, it’s that they’ve started deleting what they’ve previously published, and in many cases closing their accounts as well.

In addition, Facebook had to face the problem with its numbers, its accounts and above all its plans for the future, and the fact that it was a social network that failed to attract the youngest, which considered it a social network “for older people”. Facebook, attracted by formats such as Instagram, the now defunct Vine, Snapchat and above all TikTok, had to face both the disapproval of its users and the disinterest of the little ones.

It’s true that since then Facebook has tried to improve when it comes to privacy. It now offers an enormous degree of control, even higher in the European Union thanks to the regulations of this common space, but he keeps tripping over the same stone, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose, something we saw again just a month ago. And it’s not that they don’t learn, no, it’s that user privacy goes against the social network’s monetization model.

Over the past few years we have seen surveys in which Facebook received the lowest ratings, something that cannot be separated from the company’s security and privacy policies. However, it is also undeniable that it continues to be among the most used services on the Internet. It’s still the social network par excellence, even if others like Twitter are making a lot more noise. According to data from SimilarWeb, Its monthly traffic is 16.6 billion visits.

Contrary to the rather widespread opinion that Facebook is not what it used to be, it is true It continues to be a service used by hundreds of millions of users every dayand that doesn’t seem likely to change in the short term. Medium? We might see a downtrend and for a long time… it’s too complicated to predict.

What is your case? Do you still use Facebook, have you stopped or have you never used this social network?