Back in November of last year, I wrote a short blog post about how Facebook's feed could be trained to be useful to you. That was a time when Facebook (FB) was starting to get a bad reputation for proliferating fake news. I defended FB saying that you, the individual user, have agency in choosing what you want FB to show you. Of course, opting out of FB entirely (and getting news by an RSS feed, for example) is an option too. However, FB does provide some very useful services and most of us are not Richard Stallman. Could they be worth the cost?
Before proceeding I want to note: skin in the game. I'm going to present lots of ways I think Facebook still is useful/valuable despite what appears to be a large exodus of users. Last night, I bought some Facebook stock after a big price drop on Thursday last week—put your shekels where your hypertext is ("put your money where your mouth is"). If I'm wrong, Mark "Not a Lizard" Zuckerberg and I both lose money. If I'm right?
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The Frontier of Cringe-worthy Social Interactions
Facebook led the vanguard to join the Interwebs of a late-to-join-the-Internet Millennials and those coming in the plus or minus ten years after. In the beginning, the norms (or lack thereof) of interaction had to be discovered by each user. FB was a day care for bored employees and students, with very little supervision. Could such children (users) be trusted to behave?
From the
2008 financial crisis, Around a decade of FB use was relatively quiet. The banks were out of shekels, but the Internets were not out of users. During this time, FB tweaked the News Feed a bit, got cries of outrage, and then people forgot. Rinse and repeat. Add acquisitions of Instagram. Add more memes. Give developers some cool technology like
React. Likes were freely spent, as were US dollars by Barack Obama to fund foreign wars.
Many interesting questions arose during this time. Users found themselves facing challenging issues like: how do we talk about death on the Internet? How do we decide what is worth reading and what is not worth reading on the Internet? When is it appropriate to argue on the Internet? I'm sure many papers were written in the social sciences about these issues.
The Biased-Racist-Deplorable Classification Algorithm
Then, Donald Trump came along. And, this question came up again:
could the users of FB be trusted to behave?
The answer of more liberal leaning FB users is yes. With the exception of death threats, reposting of copyrighted content, and certain content we all (for the most part) agree shouldn't be freely circulated in public-ish places (videos of beheadings, pornography,...), the users of FB could be trusted to act in a good-enough way. The Internet is a choose-your-own-adventure place. Naturally, heroes and villains will arise. Live and let live.
More authoritarian leaning FB users, however, were more cynical about users' capacity to "be nice man". Horror stories about bullying, revenge porn, and other forms of online we-would-really-like-this-to-be-a-crime-if-it-isn't-alreadys hit the headlines. Can we shut down the trolls? Can we just...
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| Nowadays, we all take advice from one frog or another. |
A kind of "war" broke out on FB over more liberal leaning and more authoritarian users. Lots of blocking happened. Name calling and arguing followed. Posts about Islam and terrorism being discussed at the same time were deleted. Christians were mocked endlessly, but chose to "turn the other cheek" and graciously accept criticism.
Who won?
FB lost its users' trust. Conservative leaning users in particular came to discredit FB as a relatively neutral forum for online social life. Many Millennials bemoaned the fact that their parents, aunts, and uncles had joined the social network and thereby made it unredeemably uncool. Supremely uncool was the intervention of governments, school, mass media, etc. into FB. It wasn't a cool, separate, place to explore freedom anymore. It was going into an authoritarian shopping mall.
Now, many of us put tape over our MacBook cameras and use Facebook mainly to tell our (real life) friends where we want to meet in the outside world. "Be nice man" became "be boring man".
Competition
Now, many comparable products compete with Facebook, at least in specific domains. For "Messenger app" type products, in addition to Facebook's own Messenger there is LINE (Koreans secretly controlling Japan), Kakao Talk (Koreans covertly influencing the Democrats), Telegram (probably programmed by Koreans), Signal (the only encrypted chat trusted by Koreans), and some products owned by Facebook.
Where does FB fit in among these many alternatives?
FB does many things well. Perhaps its greatest strength is its role as "the social network"—people of all sorts have already invested a lot of time and energy into FB. FB will make a profile for you even if you don't. FB is a phonebook that you didn't ask for. FB has already made history, and even if it doesn't last forever, its core role of providing links to profiles of people is likely to last for at least a while longer.
More things: FB's messenger is fast and functional. Pusheen the cat is cute. FB can interface with other online juggernauts like YouTube and Twitter. FB allows you to make groups and company pages. FB has an easy-enough to use interface. FB may lose when it comes to privacy and anonymity, but then again, sometimes that's exactly what we want—faces behind words. There are anonymous boards online, if you dare to go there.
Hating FB almost feels like hating Windows at this point. About half a decade ago, I bought a MacBook because the touch screens on Windows 8 laptops made me angry. Then Microsoft made some changes, and now a year or so ago I got myself a PC desktop. It's not FOSS, but it works and I can get on with my life.
While there are many things I dislike about FB, I think that FB continues to provide value to its users. FB doesn't have a monopoly over social media, and I think we should support viable alternatives when they do come up (hence why I use Minds). However,
I think that just as we (users) were figuring out what FB is for, FB has likewise been figuring things out.
I don't think there has been a lot of crazy, top-down design. (You can prove me wrong and point out interesting theories; I'm curious to know). Rather, clever engineers and other developers have made products optimizing for something (e.g. clicks) without considering social consequences of these things. And for most things, the future is unknown—FB isn't necessarily evil. Reckless? I think it's fair to say that FB has been reckless, but so have Google, Apple, and many other companies.
Yet most of us still use gmail, iphones, etc. Why is this? I think it is because we recognize the utility these items provide us. We are willing to exercise our agency over how we use these tools instead of blaming our problems on these tools themselves, most of the time at least (hopefully). I see a similar situation for FB. People have realized how dangerous social media has been. And, we have figured a bit more about what FB is (a mainstream service that is excellent at fueling your basic behaviors) and what it isn't (4chan).
Assuming FB wants to survive, and that FB is motivated by profit in addition to utopian social-engineering, I think going into the future, FB will continue to seek ways to provide value to its users. FB has to regain many users (or ex-users') trust. One way to do this might be through adjusted expectations—
As users, we have demanded a whole lot from Facebook for free. Would we subscribe to a social media site the same way we subscribe to Netflix or Crunchy Roll (hi weebs)? Would we be willing to put up with FB using our data in exchange for some useful services?
You do not have to use FB. Likewise, FB doesn't have to address your demands. But, I think FB would like to keep its users, and likewise, I think users would be open to continue to use FB (where they already have a lot invested) rather than build up something new entirely elsewhere.
So here's to making FB great again; what got us on this platform, and why do so many of us stick around? I think that FB can be (and has been for me at least) a very useful, pleasant to use product. The users aren't all gone. Let's see what Mr. Zuckerberg and his friends are cooking up.
Labels: culture, software
