The Fall of Facebook
When I first obtained my college email address, I did what any normal graduating high school senior would do: sign up for Facebook. Though back then it was an exciting part of being a college student, now I just want it to go away.
The Glory Days
Back in the early days of Facebook, having an account was somewhat like being a member of an exclusive club. Of course that is from my perspective of being a high school senior when Facebook was hitting its stride. The requirement of a college email address created a distinction between “lowly high school students” and the “college elite.” It may sound stupid, but that exclusivity is what made Facebook cool. It was symbolic of leaving your high school days behind and moving into a new hierarchy of the digital world.
As soon as RIT hooked me up with that ever-so-important @rit.edu extension I immediately became a member like the Zuckerberg Zombie I was. I was uploading pictures and sending out friend requests like it was my job.
The first week of college was all about making contacts, and more importantly, upping your friend count. If you got through week one without at least 20 friends you were doing something wrong. I actually know people who had 200 friends after 7 days on campus. There is no way that is possible, and another reason Facebook got stupid very fast.
Luckily after the first month or so things died down, and I came to my senses. I began to trim my friends list down to people I actually spoke to. Eventually I was in the state I am now: a complete hater.
Why I Hate Facebook
No Privacy: When you first sign up for a Facebook account, it seems cool to share your photos with your friends. Then the realization hits: anyone at your college has photographic access to the last five months of your life. Add that to your profile and other information…it seems endless.
Facebook did not help things when it debuted Beacon, its advertising scheme that shares your purchases with your friends. Wait, what? Exactly. This completely intrusive data sharing brought a lot of negative feedback to Facebook. They later tried to cover it up and do things properly, but the original execution cannot be ignored.
Then, even if you realize Facebook has become Big Brother-esque, try to change your privacy settings. Just try. You are greeted with a large mess of menus that are frustratingly unintuitive. You end up clicking a seemingly endless list of scenarios and what you want Facebook to do given the circumstances. How about just providing normal safety defaults that do not broadcast your information to the world?
Right now I have everything I can on lock-down, and I still have the sneaky feeling like Facebook is doing something behind my back. I personally do not trust the site for one second, and that is a problem when there is so much information contained within it. The strange thing is that I have a ton of photos on Flickr, but there I do not feel like someone is trying to screw with me. Facebook has given its user-base absolutely no reason to trust it at all.
Newsfeed: One of the reasons privacy become such a glaring problem was the addition of the newsfeed about a year and a half ago. Suddenly your every move was documented and shown to all your friends within seconds. The front page of Facebook is an itemized stalking guide. Though I am sure some stalkers appreciate the convenience, I do not enjoy the newsfeed that was thrust upon users a while back.
Facespace: For those not aware at this point, Facebook has become a prettier MySpace. Remember when Facebook was a step above, and MySpace was seen as for bands and the younger crowd? Not anymore. The two are essentially synonyms, especially with this new “Fans of” business.
Gifts: Pay one dollar for an 80×80 image that sits in my profile? Enough said.
People You May Know: This recent annoyance has been the catalyst for a number of friend requests. I am sure some people have found this useful, but honestly if you were not friends with such and such already you probably are not very close.
Applications: The voodoo grandmaster of all that is wrong with Facebook: applications. On May 24, 2007, Facebook launched the Facebook Platform, which allowed geeks across the globe to program exciting new features annoy me to the inner core of my being. I know I am not the only one who has received requests to be a vampire or werewolf. I would share a screen, but I think it was captured better by Paul Stamatiou, who has a lot more friends than I do:
That sidebar is one of the reasons Facebook has become one of the most annoying sites in history. And if there is a way to block all of them, I have not found it.
But Justin, You Still Have a Facebook
The sad fact is that through all my bitter ramblings I am still a user on Facebook. This is because as much as I despise it I need it for a few things. Getting email addresses for students is sometimes important, and Facebook has a searchable database of every student I need to email. The most important function I use Facebook for is intramural sports communication. As the captain of both soccer and basketball intramural teams, I use the messaging and group services to update my teams on games and such.
Were it not for those purposes, I would leave Facebook in a heartbeat. I have already found better communities for updating my status and sharing my photos. Both Flickr and Twitter are superior services without the hassle of “protecting” myself. I have a cell phone for communication via calls and text messaging, so Facebook has become near pointless. Had they stayed with the simple mindset (ala the aforementioned sites) with which they started, perhaps that would not be the case.
The Worst is Yet to Come
About a month ago it was reported that Facebook is going to debut a chat program. Great. As if students did not spend enough time on Facebook as it is, now they can even replace talking with a Facebook alternative. (My hatred of instant messaging is a subject for another post.)
Those sipping the Zuckerberg Kool-Aid (right now I think that list is only Zuckerberg himself) believe that Facebook is the future. The rest of us see it as a fad that is going to fade into worthlessness (just like MySpace did nearly instantly for me). Right now it is sadly something that most students need to have simply because of the rule of majority.
What are your thoughts on Facebook? Am I just babbling mindlessly, exaggerating left and right? Do you agree or disagree?
61 Comments
I love this post. I hate Facebook, and I deactivated my account about a month ago. Enough was enough. Like you said, at the beginning of Facebook’s creation, it was plain, clean, and simple. It looked nice, unlike Myspace which is usually clustered. I’m glad to hear you despise Facebook, but am disappointed you still have one. You could always just email your intramural team game information and such, instead of using Facebook for it. I’m pretty sure you can totally do without it.
Props to you for writing a solid article. Zuckerberg can suck a berg.
Sidenote: Myspace is good for looking up bands sometimes. I know you hate it, but I like it for bands. Other than that it’s just ritizulous.
i just sent you a facebook gift today. thanks for ripping me
You sent me a free gift from a movie you hate. I think you can deal.
YESSSS. I agree with this post 100% wtf happened to the cool exclusive college facebook of yesteryear? Facebook is quickly becoming the new myspace and I for one am against that.
I am just waiting for the FB App that lets you change your profile background wallpaper =X
After deciding I agree with your article, I stripped down my facebook and got rid of just about everything. i am very close to deleting my facebook, but it definitely does keep me in touch with some friends. plus, i wouldnt be able to kick the phantoms butt in scrabble without facebook.
When I was involved with interviewing people at my old company, I would facebook them. Didn’t matter what they had on their profile, in fact, the less ‘clean cut’ the better (in my opinion, if you can’t tip a few back and have some fun at parties, you aren’t going to be fun to work with). I didn’t not hire anyone based off their facebook, but it was the most useful way to learn a lot about someone quickly. Who their friends were that I might know, what kinds of hobbies they were in to. Stuff that is more difficult to get out of an interview, but is good to know if you wanna find someone that will be a good ‘fit’ for the company.
Basically, if I couldn’t find them on facebook, I started to wonder why they wanted to work with a web development company. Sure, maybe I have a tainted perspective on it, but, I am ok with facebook (and it’s security implications), and I for one, welcome our Zuckerberg overlords.
i agree, ive kept mine simple from day one, i dont even have a picture of myself as my profile cuz i think its creepy. but i keep it because i look at everyone else. haha i dont want anyone to know anything about me, but i will definitely snoop on everyone else.
i feel like face book is just people putting up pictures so that other people will be like” woah…they’re so ______ ” anything to make them feel better about themselves. what can i say bean and i have both shared some good laughs over facebook.
Yeah I recently heard they sell super-user type accounts to large corporations and stuff which let them view whoever they want pretty much. I haven’t searched around to confirm this but I definitely wouldn’t put it past them… see also: Facebook Beacon
I agree with most of this article (95%). Facebook has been going down hill for a while now, because of all the reasons that you pointed out. Like Faith, who shares my birthday, I keep Facebook as bare as possible, only listing my contact and school / work information. I never added any applications and deleted all the default ones.
The only thing that I would disagree with is the point you made about security. Yes, you need to put some effort into making it private, but Facebook does give you the necessary options to make it as private as you want.
I do have some friends who I can only contact through Facebook, so I think that I’ll keep my (minimal, clean, and secure) Facebook account for now.
the creator of facebook who is now 23 brought in a revenue of 150 million in 2007. Front page of the wall street journal.
@Dave: I agree that Facebook does have some uses right now, and some of those are why I have one at this point. However as a whole I just am annoyed at the service and more annoyed at what it has done to my generation. Example: “That girl’s favorite movie is Mean Girls.” “Really? Did you talk to her?” “No, I checked out her Facebook.”
See: Gym Class Heroes – Friend Request
@Nathaniel: The ability to lock down your information is available, I was just trying to say that having to jump through hoops does not exactly encourage users to have a high level of privacy. Tech-savvy users will know what they are doing, but the average Joe is going to have everything at the default setting. Also with security I was more talking about the Beacon advertising system, and basically any Facebook “feature” that steals information about your life without you knowing.
as the NBA playoffs start I want to make it completely clear that I am rooting for CP3 and the hornets and of course the pistons out of the east. Go wake.
Thank you Mark for your insightful thoughts on Facebook.
That is why you need a general comments page.
luke knows what’s up
Your requests have been heard, and I know you will enjoy what I have planned for the new site. Now just convince my professors I can skip a week of classes and I will finally have the time to get it done.
Lisa and Tiz are on their way to convince them, don’t worry.
After reading this post, I realized how much I don’t need facebook. I never got any of the applications or anything and only check it like twice a week or whenever I get emails.
@Luke, why you be volunteering me for this type of stuff.
I guess what I don’t understand is why privacy is even important. So what if every stalker in the world knows everything about you – your name, your pictures, what movies you like, where you live…? The worst that could possibly happen is that they’d come to your residence, and anything past that is illegal.
But like you [Justin] and Nathaniel said, there ARE privacy options and then you don’t need to worry about any of that.
Adam, I hope your first paragraph is not serious.
It’s mostly serious. It seems to me as though people think stalking is creepy because of an irrational fear. Stalking someone through Facebook involves a collection of information that a person has made public, or in rare cases (Beacon) Facebook has apparently made public. The point is that someone puts something on their Facebook in order for their friends to get a better gauge of themselves – what their interests are, what books they like, how they interact with people, etc.
So let’s say I go to Justin’s Facebook and I memorize everything there is to know about Justin. Does he care? Does he even know that I’m doing this? Maybe it just bothers him that someone CAN do that, not that they are. It’s a feeling of insecurity—if I can do that, anyone can, and what will someone do with that information? This is where I’m confused, because I don’t know how to answer that question. There’s nothing that they can legally do with that information besides “creep you out,” and it doesn’t creep me out if someone knows something about me that I didn’t tell them.
So yes, Luke, I realize that it sounds stupid, but I don’t understand it, and your thinking that my comment was a joke seems to imply that I am wasting my time by typing this one.
Adam, I don’t think your comment is a joke, and I understand where you are coming from with your points and some of them are good ones. But why can’t Facebook give you the option of totally blocking things, like not having a feed at all when you log in?
If you mean “why can’t Facebook stop ME [as a Facebook-user] from seeing the news feed?” then I have no idea what their reasoning is, but it doesn’t really matter since you can just ignore what you’re looking at. That’s irrelevant though, so I’m going to assume you mean “why does everything I do get posted to a news feed?” They already have options to prevent that from happening, and it’s easy to find; you just click security and you are immediately presented with four options, one of which has the text “Control what stories about you get published to your profile and to your friends’ News Feeds.”
I mean the first part of your comment. You should be able to have total control of every aspect of your profile and what you see and what other people see, and you don’t.
Yes but controlling what you see doesn’t fit into this conversation since you are not actively reading any of it, and Facebook needs some kind of front page. If you wanted, you could just go to your profile instead of the “Facebook.com” main site. I suppose it’s like saying that you can’t control what you see on the front page of jbomb.net when you’re only there for the movie reviews.
Why can’t you admit that they need to change it? You slurp the information that Facebook gives you. They should let you be in total control. You honestly think it is better now than its original from of clean and simple? No body logs in without glancing at the feed on the first page. And who wants to see so and so are in a relationship or single 15 times in one day? Also, people you might know? One of my friends said it well that if you’re not friends with that person already, or you need “people you might know” to help you then you shouldn’t be friends with them on there anyways. I just don’t see how anyone can honestly think it is better now than its original state.
You’ve had a sudden change in your tone. I was addressing what people (including you) have said.
I don’t think they should change it because I love reading about people I am “friends” with. I quote friends because it doesn’t matter to me if I talked to them once or if they are my best friends—it is still interesting information to me. I feel as though I am in total control because there isn’t any information I don’t want other people knowing, and I can change the preferences to assign priorities to information that other people have allowed me to see, whether inadvertently or not. I happen to find the relationship stories the most interesting. It’s like watching a television show involving only people I’ve talked to before.
I am not admitting that they need to change anything because I don’t believe there is anything wrong. Like I said, and I am serious here, what does it matter if you or anyone else reads extraneous information about a person? Do you really care whether you happen to see if someone broke up with someone else? Do you care if – after you’ve adjusted your privacy settings – somebody else reads the information that you’ve now allowed them to read? And I thought the old simple Facebook just brought you to your profile directly anyway, so just don’t visit Facebook.com and immediately go to your profile if that does bother you.
It is a social networking site and I think they are doing a wonderful job of connecting people. When I see “so-and-so is dreading [my] economics test” from someone I haven’t talked to in a while, it’s nice to be able to check their Facebook and see what they’re up to without having to talk to them. You probably find this socially backwards, because Facebook in this case has replaced communicating with the person.
I found out on facebook that some girl feeds her dog accounting homework. This was only possible because of the open environment.
“When I see “so-and-so is dreading [my] economics test” from someone I haven’t talked to in a while, it’s nice to be able to check their Facebook and see what they’re up to without having to talk to them. You probably find this socially backwards, because Facebook in this case has replaced communicating with the person.”
It has replaced communicating with the person, and if you don’t care enough to talk to a person you haven’t heard from in a while, why would you possibly care enough to check their Facebook to see how they’re doing since they are dreading their economics test? It’s ridunkulous.
stalking is a 1st degree misdemeanor punishable by up to 5 years in prison. reading and memorizing facebook profiles and news feeds are not stalking, since you put that information out there. you clicked a checkbox that says facebook can do just about whatever they want with your information. if you put info on there, expect it to be read.
stalking is by gaining that information by illegitimate means, or by infringing on the privacy of another person by reading their info. if you dont want someone reading you profile, block them or unfriend them, or take that info off of facebook.
@Luke: stop crying about how facebook was originally better. maybe it was, maybe it wasnt, we all have different opinions. its now a better social networking tool, and makes it easier to keep in touch with people. on the same note, it makes it easier for people to get info you dont necessarily want them seeing. it also allows you access to more information. if you dont want it, dont read it. bfd.
@Adam: like i said, first of all, stalking is a crime in and of itself. theres nothing wrong with a few pics and some info about yourself online, but if someone gets the idea that they want something you have, they could pretty easily find a bunch of info about you and track you down. its uncommon, but as it gets easier, it will happen more often.
@X: “After deciding I agree with your article, I stripped down my facebook and got rid of just about everything. i am very close to deleting my facebook[...]“. You obviously think it was better in its original from if you almost stripped it down totally. Point made.
*original form.
no…i stripped it down because i realize its really pointless for me personally to tell everyone anything about myself. secondly, if you scan through the news feed, you might find interesting stuff so that you might start talking to that person now because they did something that interests you, rather than just never talking to them again.
sidenote, facebook chat popped up today when i logged in.
sidenote 2, i deleted my facebook today after i grabbed email addresses i wanted/needed, and finished my scrabble games. goodbye facebook
how else are you going to spend countless hours online looking at peoples pictures from a party last weekend if it wasn’t for FB. So FB is a BFD.
sidenote 1 I love it when xane says bfd.
sidenote 2 how else would I know tizs personal alone time schedule if it wasn’t for facebook.
@X: I’m glad to see you got rid of it. You can play the Phantom in real life Scrabble this summer.
@Mark: That’s just ridiculous.
bfd im a bamf
sidenote 3 i love how mark planned 2 sidenotes because he put sidenote 1 instead of just sidenote, clearly because he wanted to make 2 sidenotes.
haha i had to match your two sidenotes. great observation tho.
These conversations are unbelievable. The arguing here is hilarious(And pointless). As X said, if you like it now or liked it more before, it makes no difference. they aren’t going back to what it used to be. The way I see it, the more users they get the more $$ they get and that’s all they care about.
Sidenote 1 (Everyone else is doing it) Jbomb, is this the most comments an article has ever gotten on your site?
Sidenote 2 Facebook chat just about did it for me, screw facebook.
I’m officially coming out with http://www.Tizbook.com.
i cant wait for tizbook.com
45 comments…er…now 46 comments is ridiculous.
Sidenote 3 the creator of facebook who is now 23 brought in a revenue of 150 million in 2007. Front page of the wall street journal.
@Mark (Sidenote #3) Yup, like I said, it’s all about the $$.
@Luke Jesse and I have been seeing people all over Rochester that look just like you. Justin always denies that they look like you.. It might be because I miss you and those few nights we spent together that I’ve been seeing you in everyone.
When is http://www.Tizbook.com coming out?
Sidenote 1: that dude at wendy’s was most likely a Luke clone.
Sidenote 2: Tom does really miss Luke, I’m not sure what happen between you two that one night, I heard there was some snuggling involved.
Sidenote 3: I use FB to KIT with HSF since they are mostly all in So.Cali. Also to keep track of CSz shows in HllWd and other ImPv shows in LA. And also to keep track of C-Mont news and related activities in P-Town.
Sidenote 4: Tiz would not delete his FB, he enjoys looking at pictures of girls he knows too much, and also comparing them to each other, which I participate in from time to time with input from jbounce.
Sidenote 5: having to state that you are having a sidenote is ridiculous, if you go off on a tangent isn’t it a sidenote by default?
Sidenote 6: I purposely used many abbreviations in sidenote 3 so that I can have a footnote section.
Sidenote 7: Having footnotes to footnotes is really stupid.
Sidenote 8: If you have more sidenotes than notes then doesn’t your notes become a sidenote to the sidenotes?
Footnotes: FB: facebook KIT: keep in touch HSF: highschool friends So.Cali: Southern California CSz: Comedy Sportz HllWd: Hollywood ImPv: improv LA: Los Angelas CA C-Mont: Claremont CA P-Town: Pomona CA
Footnotes to footnotes: CA: California improv: improvisational acting Comedy Sportz: an improv troup in LA located on Seward just off of Melrose. Know as the longest running show in HllWd, they have recently won the World Comedy Sportz match against the runner up Germany team. (My brother was on the CSz team).
Sidenote ∞: This is ridiculous.
Sidenote ∞+1: ignore the spelling errors place conveniently throughout my comment.
Sidenote ∞+2: ignore all spelling errors from all past, present and future comments.
I laughed my head off at Sidenote 6
the Miz’s post was Miztizcal
I miss the Tiz, Wario, and the bounce (aka the best smash teammate ever). I miss you too, jbomb. Mario’s comments are mind blowing with his abbreviations, I think they need deleted ASAP*.
*As soon as possible.
I am posting for the sole reason that this number is also the number of Sergei Gonchar, 55.
I’m posting off topic to make justin more inclined to make a forum for these posts.
Oh and to tick him off for the sole purpose of ticking him off.
This post is…
for the sole purpose of comment #58, in honor of Kris Letang. Let’s go Pens! Make a general comments forum. Go Tiz, it’s your birthday, we’re gonna Tiz on you like it’s your birthday…
this is for number 59 which is the tv guide channel in my room at wj
this is 60, cuz 60-37 (jarko ruutu), which equals 23 for jim carey in a terrible movie.
haha of all the things to pick for 23
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