Friends, Ive reached an unsettling conclusion: Facebook has become television. Facebook is supposed to be a social network, right? I visit in order to keep in touch with my friends - not for third-party content, which is not particularly social. That includes content that my friends liked or shared, which reminds me of that moment at a party where person A shows a YouTube video to person B, which leads to another YouTube video, and the party morphs into everyone watching a series of YouTube clips rather than actually interacting. Recently, my friend Troy mentioned that he hid all BuzzFeed content from his Facebook feed, and that the quality of his feed improved dramatically. So I tried it - and was pleased not to see BuzzFeeds junky content any more. Then I also hid Upworthy and Answers and CollegeHumor, and it got even better! Well, a little. I noticed that I wasnt actually seeing more social content: the most obnoxious third-party content was just being replaced by... less obnoxious third-party content. So I started hiding ALL third-party content: Gizmodo, Huffington Post, LifeHacker, Kotaku - everything. I even hid content from sources that I like, because I can find that content on Reddit. (I made exceptions for sites like Pinterest, where the shared content was often made *by* my friends, which qualifies as social.) And yet, my social news feed didnt become more social. The hidden third-party content was just replaced with other third-party content. Its a neverending stream: even if Facebook remembers that Ive hidden all content from 200 sources, there are *thousands* more. Its actually much worse than that: My mission of hiding third-party content force me to realize just how massively it dominates my news feed. Third-party content just swallows simple messages: its visually huge and colorful, with thumbnails and summaries and links and auto-playing video. And its abundant: my wall has strings of up to 10 third-party content posts, *occasionally* interrupted by my friends actual social messages. Try it - scroll through your news feed, and pay attention to what catches your eye. How is this a social experience? And thats not even including the obvious ads: The column of ads on the right that I cant hide, and that condenses my social feed from a readable format to 1/3 the width of my display. Or the search bar that readily suggests searching for music and movies and restaurants, but wont let me search my friends posts for a keyword. Or the live news feed that tells me whenever my friends share a link or tend their animals on FarmVille... Facebook is no longer, first and foremost, a social network. It is primarily a third-party content distribution channel, which incidentally allows my friends to comment, and *occasionally* allows them to insert their own messages, in tiny slivers, between all the third-party content. Thats not why I joined Facebook, and its not what I want.
Posted on: Sat, 19 Jul 2014 14:46:44 +0000
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