Facebook

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FacebookHypocrisy.jpg

Facebook is 3 things: bad interface, bad management, and biased policies. I want a social network that gives me control of what I see and share -- both to my friends and to advertisers. I realize they need to make a buck, and my information is their product, but the point is you can still give users the illusions of control. But Zuckerberg seems to have falling into the egocentric pit that many young billionaires do, they think because they timed things well, and worked hard, and got lucky that they're smarter than everyone else. This makes them arrogant, less mature, and slower to grow than the average human: Dunning-Kruger, inflated by being surrounded by yes-men.


Bad User Interface

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What do I want in a social network:

  • Ability to customize what I see: who and topics.
  • Ability to customize what I share, how it looks, and who sees.
  • Competent searching, organization, and management of my stuff
  • Competent feedback

Facebook fails at all that that. It doesn't give me control of the layout, easy management of people and what they see, what and who I get to see. Searching is shit, there's no grouping or reference for what I make available, and if I don't like something, I can't even put a thumbs down.

Each of these decisions has a reason, but they're wrong. Individually, they may increase stickiness, or prevent things like too many dislikes which might make them post less or resist the platform. But what the dimwitted geniuses miss, is that holds true for A|B testing of a feature in the short term, but not over time. Users will not put a dislike and that prevents the the recipient from getting their feelings hurt -- but then that also prevents them from growing. And the annoyed reader may go ahead and comment, which hurts the feelings more -- and may result in either side blocking the other. They prevented short term usage decrease, by increasing the odds of long term ones.

The most basic features like browsing everything you posted, is hard. The ability to auto-purge your posts after time. You do something simple like blocking someone, they remain in messenger panel. I turn off notifications, or unfollow someone, I still get notified.

The point is either you believe that the politburo knows more than users, or you trust users to manage their own relationships.

Bad Management

Zuccerberg

There's a bazillion meme's out there, all hinting at the problem. Either Mark is right and the world is wrong, or Mark is pissing off his base, and to egocentric to recognize that he's failing as a good leader.

There's two ways to lead. (1) Annoys a few people (2) Annoys most people. I'd guess that Mark is firmly in the latter category. Which is fine, you can be successful in spite of yourself, just not as successful as if you had the maturity and likability of the average 30 year old.

Bias

Here's a few links on their anti-conservative bias.

  • They work with the far-left hate-group called SPLC and use that highly biased source to flag what is FakeNews or not. I guess ThinkProgress and HillaryForPresident.org was too busy and unbiased for them.
  • There are multiple employees that admit they "routinely suppress conservative views" [1]
  • Facebook's political contributions (by party) is about 2:1 for Democrats (even when Republicans are running things), that's better than the 100:0% split for the first few years. [2]
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  • Israel Project did an experiment where they showed equally offensive anti-Israel and anti-Palestine videos, and of course the anti-Palestine one was taken down. Only after it caused a stink, did Facebook take down the anti-Israel one.

Now no one would confuse something called Israel Project with an unbiased source. But their evidence was. They later pulled the story and information -- likely under threat by FB. [3]

Instagram

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Facebook bought Instagram, so what they do, Facebook does. And Instagram withholds likes from people, to get them to post more often[4].

References

Bad UI

Bad Management

Backlash