![]() In light of the constant flow of revelations that show just how much Facebook views our contributions to its database in terms of cold dollars and opportunity for monetization, it’s no surprise that turning your nostalgia into a digital economy was a cynical calculation from the start. ![]() Let’s be honest, oblivion is the fate this feature - and all of Facebook, really - deserves. I suspect if it hadn’t been spring break and Easter/Passover, there wouldn’t have been much new there at all. A recent scroll through mine showed some updated profile pictures, a handful of Instagram pictures that were cross-posted to Facebook and no less than five memories. I don’t know what’s happening on your feed, but it feels like we’re getting close. If at some point, when we stop posting anything new, Facebook will inevitably hit Peak Memory, and the site’s News Feed will collapse upon itself, a heap of re-posted content from the year before, the two years before, the four years before. The “Memories” feature might work in the short term to keep us coming back, to keep us re-posting, to keep retraining its algorithm as to what memories we really value but, long-term, it’s Facebook’s Ouruboros -the snake that eats its own tail. ![]() It’s a cheap ploy to keep us creating new posts, keep us interested, at a time when our interest is starting to drift away.Īnd my regular re-posting introduces a bit of a plot twist, here. Now, though, I think Memories is the platform’s most cynical element. Heck, I’ve re-posted it three years in a row. I mean, I have posted some hilarious things that my son said when he was little, and that time I went on a reporting trip to Area 51 was seriously cool. Her latest column is below.įacebook’s “Memories” feature - where it shows you pictures and posts from a day in the recent or far-gone past - used to be my favorite thing about the platform. Molly Wood, host of Marketplace Tech, is an ongoing contributor to Wired’s Ideas section.
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