One of the biggest steps down in Facebook history was their removal of RSS syndication. There was a time in the past when you could subscribe your Facebook account to external RSS feeds. The entries in those feeds would create new content on your "Facebook wall". This essentially let you use any third party that supported RSS to publish content into your Facebook feed.

Facebook removed that feature. The effect of this was that people had to create content within facebook instead of outside it. This reoriented the flow of content creation so that it must originate inside of Facebook, removing the ability to use FB as a passive consumer of content created in a workflow where the creators chose the entire flow.

IMHO this is one of the biggest steps down ever in FB history. It was one of the biggest attacks on the open web, and I'm sad to say that it mostly worked, and the internet at large is worse as a result.

It’s hard to believe now, but Facebook was a good product for a while there.

I guess it happens when engineers stop driving decisions and the finance people take over. Won't be too good for the company's valuation if people can access the content elsewhere.

I guess that's why Discord is also locked down as much. They have community content that is inaccessible anywhere else but Discord.

The other step down was when you had to pay in order to guarantee that your post was seen by all of your followers.