Fear and Loathing on the Learning Curve: Observations on Life, Tech and Web Design from a Slightly Misanthropic Mind

Facebook is Shit

So over the last six months or so I’ve exper­i­enced a sour real­isa­tion. It took me a while to come to terms with it, but I think I can finally sens­ibly express what I’ve dis­covered: Facebook, the increas­ingly omni­present social wünder­kind that I so loved dur­ing my University years is now, in 2012, shit.

This rev­el­a­tion was long in com­ing, I think, thanks in no small part to my nos­tal­gic hangover from those early days. Facebook has given me so many social good­times over the years that I hardly wanted to look the truth in the eye, but now I can finally accept that the incip­i­ent little com­munity that first caught my atten­tion in 2005 has now grown to a filthy, sprawl­ing slum of irrel­ev­ance and bull­shit, and I fear the time has come to leave town.

Facebook in the early years was a dif­fer­ent beast – it had global reach, but its small fea­ture set aimed squarely at the local level – col­lege and uni­ver­sity, with accord­ing bar­ri­ers to entry. It con­nec­ted the user with people in their imme­di­ate envir­on­ment, right down to course and class level, and it all felt emin­ently manageable.

But that was then, as they say, and this is now. The Facebook of today has grown bey­ond a mere forum, pos­i­tion­ing itself as a plat­form for everything, but end­ing up as an impen­et­rable amal­gam of social net­work, cal­en­dar, phone book, photo album, event plan­ner, games con­sole, instant mes­sen­ger, loc­a­tion ser­vice, app plat­form, recom­mend­a­tion engine, mar­ket­place, and – by no means least – ad net­work. And unfor­tu­nately, it doesn’t do many of these very well.

As Facebook has per­meated the main­stream, so too has the expect­a­tion that the parts of our social graph that we care about will fol­low suit; that since we now have access to the recor­ded lives of every­one we’ve ever known in the entire world, we’ll want to keep up with the activ­it­ies of those people every­where, all the time, forever. Coupled with the seem­ingly now com­mon­place assump­tion that our Facebook net­works should be a com­plete ana­log of our real-life social graph, we’re left with a social sys­tem that rap­idly escapes our abil­ity to man­age it.

When I was first at Uni my Facebook net­work con­sisted of fewer than a hun­dred people, all of whom I knew well enough to stop to talk to in the street; out in the real world of 2012, I now have nearly five hun­dred con­tacts, des­pite some prun­ing efforts, and for me at least this has just about des­troyed Facebook’s use­ful­ness as a plat­form for any­thing. To log in to Facebook now is to be assaul­ted by a never-ending stream of irrel­ev­ance and tri­vi­al­ity from the count­less con­tacts who I don’t really know, and many of those I do. Despite numer­ous reor­gan­isa­tions of the News Feed, Facebook seems to have taken the sur­feit of avail­able social data and dis­reg­arded it com­pletely in favour of offer­ing me pro­gress­ively less rel­ev­ant inform­a­tion. The “Top Stories” met­ric is poorly tuned, boost­ing items that have attrac­ted com­ments and Likes from any­one, regard­less of my rela­tion­ship with them. It could at least pri­or­it­ise stor­ies from people I’m obvi­ously more likely to be inter­ested in, like those with whom I’ve inter­ac­ted recently, but it doesn’t.

This sort of activ­ity fire­hose was inter­est­ing and man­age­able back in the day due to the nature of the net­work – a smal­ler graph con­sist­ing mostly of people in my imme­di­ate envir­on­ment whose posts and event invites were, more often than not, rel­ev­ant to my interests – but now with hun­dreds of con­tacts scattered around the globe the Events sys­tem has become a gigantic spam machine-gun, helped in no small part by the ease with which someone can invite every single con­tact to join an event or become a fan of a page. The bull­shit echo cham­ber of my News Feed fills up with near-strangers talk­ing about their job, or the weather, or tele­vi­sion, or stand­ing next to their new car or a horse or their lunch; my inbox fills up with noti­fic­a­tions of invites to events halfway round the world, and I’m increas­ingly minded to ignore everything. With all the com­put­ing power and his­tor­ical social data in the world, Facebook remains unable to show me any­thing I actu­ally give a shit about.

Clearly the solu­tion is to aggress­ively prune my con­tact list until I’m left with only “real” friends, but where does one draw the line? And given all this data, surely it shouldn’t be neces­sary to do this? But it seems it is, because without it, Facebook becomes a ter­ri­fy­ing global memory machine that sub­verts the tra­di­tional decay pro­cess of social con­nec­tions and replaces them with a world where no-one is per­mit­ted to for­get any­one, instead being con­stantly bom­barded with minu­tiae about them. To derive any non-trivial value from it requires con­stant shit­work to main­tain friend lists, adjust pri­vacy set­tings and con­tent pref­er­ences, time argu­ably bet­ter spent actu­ally going out­side and see­ing people. And prun­ing those con­tact lists is tough, because every­one assumes your Facebook graph should mir­ror your meat­space one, and it’s tricky to get away with de-friending someone you might bump into again just to get their guff off your timeline.

Speaking of ter­ri­fy­ing memory machines, the Timeline pro­file view is a par­tic­u­lar exas­per­a­tion that while optional now will soon no doubt be stand­ard for all, with its grubby abil­ity to instantly tele­port back to any user’s first tent­at­ive shares and embar­rass­ingly youth­ful pho­tos. I know of more than one per­son who has deleted a large chunk of their early pho­tos and data in response to this. With Facebook’s insist­ence on redesign­ing its UI every few months, the lack of con­trol over this chan­ging present­a­tion of what is after all our data is pretty irrit­at­ing. In the real-life friend­ship model we focus on the present with a few memor­ies skimmed off the top of his­tory, but no more. Now our drunk pho­tos from forever are just a flick of the scroll­bar away.

A lot has been writ­ten about Facebook’s data col­lec­tion activ­it­ies and while that isn’t such a major con­cern for me, it prob­ably should be. Facebook’s huge valu­ation at their recent IPO under­lines the import­ance of their lever­aging the moun­tains of social data they retain, and we should be under no illu­sions as to their inten­tions. When the dimen­sions of data they have access to are com­bined, we reach the sort of level of intel­li­gence gov­ern­ments get very excited about, and here we are giv­ing all this inform­a­tion away for free.

So why not just leave alto­gether? That’s the million-dollar ques­tion, and the one I find most frus­trat­ing. Given Facebook’s per­vas­ive­ness, I feel like I have to retain at least a token pres­ence for fear of miss­ing out on key things. It’s mostly events, I think – since nobody seems to pro­mote those by any other means any­more – but worse, more and more sites and apps now use Facebook Connect as their sole authen­tic­a­tion sys­tem, mak­ing it even more pain­ful to avoid hav­ing a Facebook account.

The trick, then, must be to trim those con­tacts back to the bare min­imum, get rid of any sur­plus data that I don’t feel like keep­ing around, and try not to worry. Facebook will be around whether I’m on it or not, so I might as well try to sal­vage some value from it without being driven com­pletely mad. Just don’t expect me to return your pokes or Like that photo of your feet.

Thanks to Tim Anderson for read­ing drafts of this post.