This will be a shorter post -
It's Zuck's world and we're all just living in it. I'll post more anti-FB stuff in later posts but for now I'd just like to clarify the situation for all those who think all social media is equal and who don't think about the companies or personalities that run the services they use to talk to their friends. I love social media – this, write.as, is a form of social media – but not all of it! I don't wish to be anti social, I love people and connection. But the way FB does it is... less than optimal.
Beacon in 2007. Your company literally just got started, then you do things like that?
The fact Zuck took the idea of FB from the Winklevosses, or Aaron Greenspan. Sure people will say “well, FB is huge now, therefore Zuckerberg was right” but you don't really know what else would have transpired in history. It's a shame that we haven't had an alternate timeline to discover where social media developed naturally instead of Zuck running it from the onset (he's a pathological liar). You can say “well, that was then, he's learned now”. Except that he later bullied the Instagram founders and Whatsapp too, and literally lied about acquiring Whatsapp saying the data would be unable to be shared between servers. Silicon Valley has a long list of people who have rubbed up against Zuck's dishonesty.
The shifting privacy settings and expectations, what people signed up for is not necessarily what they have now.
The closing off of protocols. Want to send someone a Facebook message? You need Messenger and a Facebook account for that. No federation here! You used to be able to read your messages via email. No more of that! Gotta go on Facebook. Ads are all that matters. Want to read friends' posts off of Facebook, like via RSS? Can't do that, either.
I will remind you by the way this is a company that talks about “connecting the world”. Fuck right off, you and your horseshit.
The fact they make it addictive as possible. Endless notifications. You're informed when someone has read your message, with a little checkmark. Better sit there refreshing that for 9 hours!
Facebook takes our privacy “seriously”? Don't make me laugh.
This all coming out of a company founded in 2006. Just as the internet was taking off. The fact that it's popular doesn't say much about its technical merit. People joined because it was better than Myspace – which it was. The interface was cleaner, before they stuffed it with bullshit (speaking of which: algorithmic feeds! Want to see posts in chronological? You have to click a separate button for it. And who knows whether that's all your friends' posts, anyway?) And yes, the shifting goalposts over the years (private profiles! You want those? Too bad, Facebook now makes you unable to be unsearchable or have inaccessible profile pages to the public).
I love people. I love social interaction. I don't like Facebook, how much it cares about “privacy” (funniest joke I've ever heard), that it crushes its competition. The rosy public image it portrays compared to what it actually is (why can't companies just be honest?). The internet is wide and vast and there's so much to do in life, so many real connections to make, other ways to contact people. Or you can sit on Facebook and refresh your notifications 99999999 times a day.
I know which one I prefer.