When was the last time you clicked the Like button on some piece of content outside of Facebook, causing anyone who sees your Facebook activity to see your little recommendation in their news feed? Better yet, when was the last time you commented on a piece of non-Facebook content by clicking a Facebook comment button?
Apparently these buttons are still alive somewhere, and used enough to merit an announcement from Meta that they’re going away next year on Feb. 10.
It’s probably wise for Meta to memory-hole these artifacts of a more naive time on the internet.
In 2010, following the roaring success of the Like button the previous year, Facebook rolled out something called the Open Graph, an array of products for developers that overlaid the social functions of Facebook on whatever site was willing to use them. It was, in theory, a sort of symbiotic throuple relationship between the external site, which got traffic; the user, who got a social experience; and Facebook, which got everyone’s data.
It’s eerie to read Time‘s Dan Fletcher writing about the release of these products back then. “Facebook wants to make the Web more social, and in the process increase the information you’re willing to share,” Fletcher’s article began. The foreshadowing just gets worse from there:
Each time you indicate that you like something, that information is fed back to Facebook and then to the website you’re on. If enough of your friends like the same restaurant on Yelp, you’ll see that on Yelp and when you log in to Facebook. Like this article? Click the button, and your friends may see your recommendation when they visit TIME.com.
One Cambridge Analytica scandal later, I think we can all agree that letting our preferences and emotions be converted into data and harvested all day long by a tech company was, at best, a questionable life decision.
According to Meta’s own blog post about the sunsetting of these features, “The plugins that will be discontinued reflect an earlier era of web development, and their usage has naturally declined as the digital landscape has evolved.”
Meta notes that developers don’t actually have to do anything to get rid of the buttons. When the end comes, they’ll just stop showing up—or rather that each will be rendered as a “0x0 pixel (invisible element) rather than causing errors or breaking your website functionality.”
But not all of the old fashioned “Social Plugins” for Facebook are ending. If you’ll scroll to the bottom of this article, you’ll see a “Share this story” module with a little Facebook “F.” That thing is not going anywhere as far as we can tell. We asked Meta to confirm this, and will update if we hear back. In the mean time, feel free to click it, just to make absolutely sure it still works.
