Thursday cannon fodder: on this day...

According to Twitter (don’t worry, I verified it on Wikipedia), on this day in 2004, Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook. I have thoughts.

I started using Facebook in 2005, before I headed off to college. It was a semi-useful way to connect with classmates before we got to school. It’s still useful for a handful of things — keeping in touch with old friends, sharing pictures with grandma, etc.

But boy has it changed, and not for the better. I’m not going to go into all the pernicious, harmful, and downright dangerous things that Facebook enables these days. There has been plenty of coverage of those phenomenon in the media that you can search up on your own if you’d like / aren’t familiar.

I am no longer using Facebook. I deactivated my account three years ago and haven’t looked back. My quality of online life has improved significantly since then, and I don’t feel like I’m missing anything at all. Don’t worry — I still get plenty of online toxicity from Twitter.

Taking a bit of an abrupt turn here, but here’s my prompt for you: if you could go back in time and prevent one thing from being invented (for whatever reason), what would that be? Honestly, mine might be Facebook.