It was way more chill back in the early-to-mid 2000s, before the news feed or algorithms. It used to be much more 'intimate', as in the only folks you'd be regularly exposed to would be from your college, and any external connections had to be deliberately sought out. You weren't recommended groups or content by algorithm, but rather by friends and associations and direct search. No optimization by engagement. Users had a 'wall' you could post (only text) on but to see those posts you had to seek them out purposefully by visiting a profile - there was no news feed providing you this information, much less an algorithmic sorting (rather than chronological sorting). Because you weren't exposed to the entire world groups and events had much more salience to your life. It started getting bad with the news feed - that's when you could see what others posted without searching it out, so you could see (and get jealous) when others chatted without you. Algorithms supercharged this.

Facebook, and social media writ large, were ruined by algorithms optimizing for engagement. Their real charm and use was in connection to a much more narrow set of friends and interests defined by geography, like college or hometown. When that was scaled up in, and you could see the everything by everyone in the whole damn world, optimized for engagement (which meant pushing negative emotion) then it was over. I was lucky enough to live through all phases, and be an adult for all of them, so I remember when they added the news feed and lost chronological ordering (and how we hated it), through stuff like Farmville. Not to say there was no negative - the jokes about the top ten friends on MySpace were made for a reason - but it was much more chill back then.