There’s another, related factor, though: the desire to broadcast the nature of these bonds. “Apes groom each other as a way of maintaining connections and making those connections public,” Sam Gosling, a psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin, told me. “That’s what Facebook does. It’s a way of publicly grooming your friends. Those conversations that happen on people’s walls could just as easily have happened in private. Facebook allows us to meet this very basic social need, and to do that on a broad scale.”

I’ve loathed Facebook for a long time, but that’s largely been a response not to what they’re doing, but how and why they’re doing it. Lately, they’re softening my stance, making moves that tells me that they understand that a shift away from the mindless garbage that pervades the platform is needed. There’s a reason Facebook got as big as it did; it fills a fundamental psychological need. They’d do well to recognize that need and focus on it, rather than trying to be synonymous with the internet as a whole.

Why Are We Still on Facebook? : The New Yorker