I created my Facebook page in 2006 as a high school sophomore. The social network had just made the jump from the ivory towers of higher education and become the new thing to have. It was easy, it was free, and above all else: it was stupid. Unlike Ruby Karp, a brilliantly articulate 13-year old who took to Mashasble recently to explain why she and her friends forego Facebook, I was not waxing journalistic about the intersection between teen trends and social network popularity.

My Facebook page, much like my failed attempt at a MySpace page, was populated with the inane trappings of being a teenager. Blurry mirror selfies. Repetitive re-posting of memes. “Deep and thoughtful”, statuses updates about things that meant nothing to anyone but me. My Facebook was a mess of a social media presence and that was to be expected. Teenagers are, by definition, messes of people.

Facebook is hemorrhaging younger, newer generations of potential users that’s bad for their  bottom line as the platform currently exists. The alarmist reaction says that Facebook is doomed, but I don’t think that that’s where things are heading. Having built up a modestly substantial Facebook web over the past seven years, I’ve become a different kind of Facebook user and so have the bulk of my friends.

Article repostings, announcements for parties, and the pictures from said parties are the vast majority of what I tend to see while scrolling through my newsfeed at any given moment. Increasingly though, I’m seeing more and more people taking time to craft longer-form posts, create and share media-rich content, and becoming savvy with Facebook’s brand pages to promote their projects.

Facebook’s users have matured and the social network that they grew up with needs to follow suit in order to better serve their needs. Sure, teens are fleeing Facebook en masse, but that’s not a bad thing. Rather than indoctrinating a new generation of users ready to express their social growing pains through the platform, why not cater to the somewhat older crowd with features that they’d be more likely to use?