Facebook has been receiving a lot of bad press lately, and for good reason. Since the start I had seen Facebook as a tool for bad, and people now are starting to realize it isn’t some benign free service that someone created just for you.
There’s a reason there’s a saying “If the product is free, you are the product”.
I always resisted Facebook. In the beginning I saw it as a huge time suck, which obviously it is. I wanted to focus my attention to more important things, like building my business. I knew I had a finite amount of productive energy per day, and didn’t want it eaten up by Facebook.
I had a lot of colleagues think Facebook was a marketing tool, which it can be, but I felt my marketing efforts could be better spent outside Facebook. I think I’ve been proven right. Better still, when marketing outside of Facebook, you’ve immediately separated yourself from all that noise, and gain an immediate advantage.
As the years went on, I saw Facebook as far more evil than just a time suck. I began to learn more and more about how it was monetizing its users. How it literally profits from outrage. The more angry you become, the more you share articles that upset you, and the more you comment on them, and the more ads they can sell.
I began to see Facebook more and more like “The Matrix”. The users were like pod people, being manipulated in ways they didn’t even comprehend.
Then the 2016 election hit, crazy conspiracy theories, Russians trying to get all sides fighting with each other, and how everyone started to form bigger bubbles around themselves, stifling normal discourse.
And then back to the real reason Facebook exists : to make money off you in highly targeted advertising. It knows you better than you realize and collects vast amounts of information. There are thousands of engineers there trying to devise more ways to keep you using (hooked on) the system.
I see people addicted to it. I see how they can’t keep their phone off for a movie, or while they drive a car.
It all made me very uncomfortable.
I’m glad the light is being shown now more on these things. That people are at least talking about it.
I know a lot of people now are saying “I’d quit Facebook but there’s nowhere else to go” and they’re probably correct if they just want a clone of it. But I’ll suggest that we shouldn’t just look for a new Facebook. We should not just switch to something else. I hope that maybe we can use the internet more like the old days and just have pockets of activity in various places. This is why I have my own blog. I realize less people are going to read it, but that’s ok.
We shouldn’t ever hope to have a single company or entity control so much of the internet ever again.
