TheProblemWithFacebook

Quora Answer : What does it mean if a person doesn't want to be on a site like Facebook?

Jul 30, 2016

The trigger event for me closing my Facebook account was reading about Zuckerberg's FWD lobbying group and the climate-change denying politicians it was supporting.

But this was really the last straw of a bunch of dissatisfactions with Facebook.

I had privacy concerns about giving so much information about my personal life and connections to a single American corporation that I have no particular reason to trust with them.

I didn't like the way that so much of my time was going into writing things in Facebook groups that became virtually impossible to search for or find again. And that I was no longer writing for my blog. I felt I was becoming a share-cropper. (As I've written elsewhere, I wouldn't write as much on Quora if I couldn't extract my writing to use elsewhere : Phil Jones (He / Him)'s answer to How can I extract all my answers from Quora and write them to a PDF file? )

I didn't like the way that Facebook was automatically collapsing every paragraph longer than a couple of lines, and squashing writing into a very narrow column. Facebook optimizes for quantity and flow in its user interface. Their ideal is for you to see things like PictureMemes, make a snap judgement to like / repost and move on. It's a very hostile environment for long-form text that is meant to be read slowly and thought about carefully without distractions. Flow-optimized social media like Facebook and Twitter are making us collectively stupider.

After quitting, I've seen more things I don't like about Facebook .

1) It's effectively privatized your social connections and is now selling them back to you.

2) Unless you're very careful, it's hard to compartmentalize your life because anyone from any part of your life can see how you interact with people from other parts. People are losing the ability to play different roles in different groups.

I'm very glad to no longer be on Facebook.

Quora Answer : Do you agree with Bernie Sanders that Facebook needs to be broken up?

Nov 7, 2019

Yep.

There needs to be a maximum size on all companies. Not only to ensure they don't dominate and distort the market (though that too), but to stop any individual people owning too much money and power. Some of the biggest problems we have in politics today are fake political campaigns and parties funded by billionaires.

However, while I am very happy to see Facebook "broken up", what I think would, in some ways, be MORE immediately useful and practical, would be Facebook obliged to "open up".

We used to have open standards for communication : telephone, email etc. and you could choose whichever provider of telephones or email you wanted, and still be able to talk to people who made other choices. With FB, Whatsapp, Messenger etc. we've lost that.

What I'd like to see is Facebook obliged to open Messenger / Whatsapp etc. up to use an open protocol, so that any company can provide a client that can participate in messaging, or posting to Facebook or subscribing to feeds from other people etc.

Similarly, the FB apps should be able to post using the same protocol to other people's clouds and servers if the users prefer.

We also need FB to be open about the data it is gathering. There needs to be a public audit and report every year of everything it knows and is inferring about its users.

With these two provisos in-place : an obligation to make its platform interoperable with rivals, and public scrutiny of what it (and its rivals) actually know, then I think the actual size of the conglomeration is less urgent to address.