Facebook Is The Past
Rudderlessness, bloat, and attrition will accelerate the brand’s irrelevance
It is a media juggernaut. It’s the cornerstone of your marketing. It’s your customer data. It’s your analytics. It’s where you meet your customer “face to face.” It is how your brand/product/service/personality/idea go viral.
And it will soon be irrelevant.
Ever caught yourself mindlessly scrolling through your news feed? Incensed by a post from a friend or a shared article? Wondered why you didn’t use text, email, Snap, Instagram or some other application instead?
You’re not alone.
That’s because Facebook’s user experience sucks. It’s the epitome of the zeitgeist — another meaningless, frustrating, and incongruous journey from login to logout, committed to distracting us effectively enough to harvest convertible data to sell to advertisers.
We are approaching peak Facebook. The data won’t tell you this, but here are the major reasons why.
It Lacks A Core Purpose
In August of 2016, long after publishers recognized that Facebook was a critical component of their distribution architecture, Zuckerberg claimed Facebook was “not a media company.”
…we are a tech company, not a media company.
Six months later, its capacity to impact a national election in the world’s only superpower was “a crazy idea.”
Personally, I think the idea that fake news on Facebook ― of which it’s a small amount of content ― influenced the election in any way is a pretty crazy idea.
By September of that year, he’d regretted he’d said it.
Calling that crazy was dismissive and I regret it. This is too important an issue to be dismissive.
By December, he was committed to fixing it, even at a 60 percent increase in expenses.
I’m dead serious about this.
What happened?
Last summer, Zuckerberg announced a new mission statement for the social media giant, evolving from “making the world more open and connected” to “give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.”
The changing of a company’s mission statement is a perfect opportunity for observation. It can reflect a comprehensive analysis of the future of its market and a strategic evolution of its core purpose, or it can reveal a rudderless management grasping for direction in a stormy sea. Generally, it’s somewhere in between. According to Zuckerberg,
In times like these, the most important thing we at Facebook can do is develop the social infrastructure to give people the power to build a global community that works for all of us.
The challenge at the scale of two billion monthly active users, of course, is that it becomes increasingly harder to create a “community that works for all of us”—what works for one community is anathema to another. And this revelation came on the heels of his “listening tour” of the 50 states — claimed by many to be a sign of his presidential ambitions — which ended with the realization that he needs to “fix” his product.
It’s this idea that Facebook has contributed to the erosion of social cohesion that even early developers of the platform now criticize.
According to Chamath Palihapitiya, former Facebook VP of User Growth:
The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works.
But our caustic disagreements here in America pale in comparison to the impact the company has had on other societies.
As Christina Larson notes in a fascinating account for Foreign Policy magazine:
Facebook has become an accidental political juggernaut — providing public evidence used by authoritarian governments to imprison liberals and journalists for expressing dissent, and amplifying the reach of racist demagogues whose dangerous and false diatribes happen to collect a lot of rabid clicks.
As Larson notes in one example, Cambodia was ground zero for a new Facebook “timeline” feature that virtually wiped out the dissemination of news for which the company had become essentially the sole distributor, in a nation that lacks the existing media infrastructure of western nations or the countervailing force of a robust and independent press.
This was followed by the company announcing it was abandoning its attempt to combat fake news by publishing “disputed flags” on articles warranting such a label. The effort mostly fell flat or was, by many accounts, even counterproductive. This occurred despite the company partnering with such external partners as the Associated Press, Snopes, ABC News, Politifact and FactCheck.org.
And on January 12th, it announced changes to its algorithm to de-prioritize news in favor of posts from friends and family, sending the publishing industry (for whom Facebook is often its primary distributor) into a tailspin.
Zuckerberg may have a vision for the future of his company, but his admission that “fixing” it is his primary goal for 2018 reveals acknowledgement of an existential crisis rather than a simple strategic reorganization in response to market forces.
He’s more concerned with what Facebook isn’t than what it is.
It’s Inherently Political
“Bringing the world together” under the auspices of one social network is an audacious and visionary mission. The obvious challenge is that many societies — and perhaps more importantly, governments — around the world do not claim shared values. To suppose one could unify them in one cohesive platform is optimistic, at best. This point is not lost on Zuckerberg.
Sitting here in California, we’re not best positioned to identify the cultural norms around the world.
Nevertheless, Facebook is an American company to its core. What Zuckerberg and other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs — and indeed the western world at large — regard as basic, if not yet universal human rights, more or less reflects what the plurality of Americans consider their inalienable rights: universal suffrage, free speech, a free press, freedom of religion, and freedom of assembly.
These constitute the fundamentals of a “civically-engaged community,” a component of the five important questions that need answering to facilitate “bringing us together as a global community.” One of the two core parts of this necessary social infrastructure, he claims, involves empowering self-governance.
The first encourages engagement in existing political processes: voting, engaging with issues and representatives, speaking out, and sometimes organizing. Only through dramatically greater engagement can we ensure these political processes reflect our values.
Fair enough, except that in many countries where Facebook operates, and indeed where it is currently experiencing its greatest growth, political engagement and organizing are discouraged, if not outright banned. In fact, Facebook expects that its business in emerging markets will grow at more than 2.5x the rate of developed economies in 2018.
One cannot discuss emerging markets without discussing China, with its population of 1.4 billion and rapidly burgeoning, tech-enabled middle class. Facebook has been banned in the country since 2009.
Zuckerberg has since taken it upon himself to learn Mandarin, as well as becoming a member of the advisory board for Tsinghua University’s School of Economics and Management in 2014. As part of an ongoing courtship to gain reentry into this critical market, Facebook even hired William Shuai of LinkedIn, notable for helping the career-oriented social network re-enter the country after agreeing to censor content and submit to one of its controversial local joint ventures.
If entry into the Chinese market requires a joint venture with a local Chinese tech company complying with the government’s censorship policy and sharing of user data, can it simultaneously support “speaking out and sometimes organizing” in another location?
Sure. But it can’t then claim that the company’s core values actually drive its decision-making processes.
Companies modify their products to comply with international markets every day. You put the steering wheel on the right if you’re selling a car into the U.K.; you use a 120V power supply if you’re shipping your electronics product to the United States. But the product remains fundamentally the same. A Facebook that shares your user data with the government and censors your posts is a fundamentally different product.
Zuckerberg misses the point that engagement in “existing political processes” — at its most fundamental level in a democracy — involves dialogue with people whose views differ from our own. His answer?
Each person should see as little objectionable content as possible.
So our relationship to the world at large is inconvenient if it reduces the enjoyment of our Facebook session.
This is the major rub with Zuckerberg’s vision of community, and what I believe is his greatest miscalculation. “Objectionable content” is an amorphous categorization capable of including ideas that are simply different from our own in addition to what could widely be agreed upon as vitriolic and despicable content. And in many markets, like China, the government is going to define “objectionable content” if the social media company wishes to operate there.
You can’t operate a company that the wider public believes has an impact on “how society works” without it being inherently political. Zuckerberg skips this part of the equation because he really doesn’t have an answer to it.
The idea is to give everyone in the community options for how they would like to set the content policy for themselves. Where is your line on nudity? On violence? On graphic content? On profanity?
On…politics? So he’s playing to safe choices here. We can individually set our “content policy” on things like nudity, violence, graphic content, and profanity without separating ourselves from our community at large. After all, these are the kind of criteria that separate PG-13 films from R-rated ones. We’re generally not appalled that our neighbors let their kid see an R-rated movie at 12. It’s the kind of things parents discuss, like adults.
Politics, however? Social issues? Zuckerberg leaves these out because he knows the answer isn’t so simple.
What you decide will be your personal settings.
See also: Create your bubble.
We will periodically ask you these questions to increase participation and so you don’t need to dig around to find them.
Well that’s a relief. We’re all busy after all.
For those who don’t make a decision, the default will be whatever the majority of people in your region selected, like a referendum. Of course you will always be free to update your personal settings anytime.
This assertion should come as a welcome gift to those claiming a minority opinion in the region they find themselves. Liberal transgender African-American living in Birmingham, Alabama? Conservative pro-choice Christian living in San Francisco? No worries: just change your settings!
And if a change in your settings weren’t enough, Facebook is committed to continual improvement,
even if that involves building a worldwide voting system to give you more voice and control. Our hope is that this model provides examples of how collective decision-making may work in other aspects of the global community.
Collective decision-making. A worldwide voting system. Are these concepts congruous with governments across the world capable of controlling the flow of information into, out of, and within their countries via fiberoptic cables? Voting itself isn’t a concept some nations are particularly enthusiastic about introducing.
So there is widespread concern about Facebook’s impact on society and politics and that concern is well-founded. Nevertheless, I think that’s only a symptom of the company’s underlying problem, rather than the problem itself.
It’s Bloated
The biggest challenge with Facebook is its lack of focus.
The natural result of casting a larger net is that the content becomes less relevant. On Twitter, you are generally reading short thoughts in the form of text. Snapchat is primarily a vanishing video format. Pinterest is your digital scrapbook. Instagram (a Facebook property) is for pictures.
Facebook is the digital mall.
One store is selling tea. The next, high-end women’s clothing. Between the two? A kiosk with phone cases or fidget spinners. The next, baby photos. After that? Video games, or skin care products, or pets, or jewelry, or chocolate, or sunglasses or fast food.
And yeah, some of your friends are there. They’re talking about celebrities or how they just got engaged or the latest infuriating political topic or sharing a cat video. Beyond that, you’re here because you want to sell something, because you’re bored, or because you have some sort of psychological dependence on the platform (all the other kids are at the mall!).
Allow me to extend the analogy just a bit further.
Malls are doing poorly. While the transition to online shopping is an obvious culprit, changing patterns of socialization are also a contributing factor.
According to investment firm Piper Jaffray’s most recent semi-annual “Taking Stock With Teens” research report, mall traffic among teenagers has declined 30 percent since 2007. Teenagers and millennials alike are tending to prefer spending on experiences rather than products. And they are avidly sharing those experiences on…social media — just generally not Facebook.
In fact, of the 6,100 teens surveyed on their favorite social media platform, Facebook ranked a distant third at just 9 percent, well behind Instagram at 24 percent and Snapchat at 47 percent, which is almost half. Today’s youth view it more as a LinkedIn — a profile manicured for the public. Too mainstream to be cool, too standard to ignore.
Snapchat has found its niche among this demographic in that privacy is inherent to its design, a common concern for teenagers testing the boundaries of their independence. According to a Pew Research Center study of 2015, 61 percent of parents claim to have checked their teen’s web browsing history, with almost half having gone through call records and text messages.
Snapchat and Instagram are visual and fast. Facebook, by being feature rich, is inherently denser. Smaller button sizes and a more complicated decision tree mean additional coordination, heightened attention, and hence a slower path to an engagement award such as a like, share, view, or clap. Speed matters. Nearly half of all internet users — not just teens — will abandon a page if loading time takes more than 3 seconds.
Arguably, nothing is faster and easier than the text message. Teens still send almost twice as many messages using iMessage than Facebook Messenger. Interestingly enough, some contend that Apple needs to “make it an alluring place for developers and consumers alike” in order to maintain its dominance in chat.
I disagree.
iMessage, Snapchat and Instagram provide a more positive UX because they limit experience to a defined channel. Facebook has no “lane.” We can never know what we are going to experience, or that we will receive the satisfaction of completing an interaction, however that is digitally defined.
Each lane is an opportunity for disruption. Because Facebook invests in all of them, it owns none.
Facebook’s impact on our understanding of the world is profound. How it transmits and regulates information determines, to a large degree, how we view the world and each other. Simply not owning an account is construed by some as a red flag. Acceptable as a baby boomer, but “not on Facebook” among millennials and Generation Z? There’s a story there.
There is no bigger vision than to “build a community that works for all of us.” And Zuckerberg deserves credit for developing a product from thin air that has connected the world in ways we never knew possible. There are few of us who truly knew the world before Facebook existed who haven’t experienced the combination of wonder, nostalgia, and optimism at reconnecting with a face from the past who we’d surrendered to the sands of time.
But that was then. And that’s not good enough anymore.
Building a community that works for all of us is a somewhat quaint notion. The community’s already been built. It is the things we wish to see least that arguably are now the ones we must face more than ever. We cannot unfollow the parts of the world we don’t like and expect a better future.
But technology eats its own. Facebook won’t be the demise of society. It’ll be picked apart by the legions of entrepreneurs ready to capitalize on its weaknesses.
After all, it’s just the digital mall—that graying, half-empty building where the kids no longer hang out.
