In one particular way, at least…
EDITED TO ADD: Recently, Facebook has crossed the line with a rather creepy Facebook Experiment.
–> Here’s the Twitter hashtag so you can check it out.
Read on to find out why I’m glad I stopped using Facebook about two years ago…
I’m going “old fogy” on this one…
The Internet, more specifically the World Wide Web, used to be about something much different than it does in the “post-Facebook” era.
I suppose others have spoken up about this in other ways, like Anil Dash for example. But my main point centers around Facebook’s “Like” button.
The Like button has turned us all into brand advocates, into data sharingsocieties (notice the plural), and allows Facebook to capitalize on that. It allows Facebook to “share our sharing” with companies.
Some people are OK with that, and I must admit, at first I was too.
Don’t get me wrong, Google and other data monoliths are also part of this camp in certain ways … but Facebook ruined the culture of the Internet in several key ways that, when combined (not in individual parts), make it unique:
- Walled garden. You play in Facebook, by their rules.
- By encouraging a lazy “Like” culture … where the Web itself was about the comment, the dialogue, the one to many conversation.
- By trying to be “everything” … the Web already was everything we needed, we didn’t need Facebook’s “rules” for operating digitally.
We lost the Web, the valuable version of the web.
The web was meant to be open, not closed. Facebook is closed. The “Like” button in particular closed the final loop, the psychological one.
The web wasn’t meant to be an easy, plug ‘n’ play, lazy type of media. Facebook’s Like button made our thoughts convenient, one-click, bite-sized … and also turned our thoughts into leverage for their shareholders.
The Web itself isn’t going to take your thoughts and leverage them into profits.
Now, before you start thinking this is an argument against user-generated content, it isn’t. It’s also not an argument against using the Web for commercial purposes.
I just think that, as a society, we have to change our models and definition of how we profit from using the Web. Whoring out users data for profit, specifically in the context of the data you don’t publish yourself, needs to be dropped as a business model.
I know, I know, forget that right? Big-data is already so pervasive we can’t do anything about it … right?
I don’t think so. I want my Web back, the one where sharing actually dominated the conversation, not private data-arbitrage. I haven’t even gotten into “Like-fraud” or “Like-spamming” (as Anil points out in the video I linked to).
The “Like” button is a “data-arbitrage” button. To me, it destroys the true value of the Web for our society. I would rather (and do) share what I like myself, without Facebook’s help.
NOTE: The Like button led to +1, which is also rather lazy … but the originator gets blamed. Tweet buttons, to me, perform a minimum function of sharing a conversation … but Twitter isn’t off the hook all the way either.
