Against facebook

I can't help but feel terrible when I see all the news and articles coming out against facebook. No, I am not supporting facebook and all the terrible decisions they made. What I feel bad about is that we haven't learn anything.

The problem is that we are blaming Zuckerberg or Sheryl Sanderberg. Facebook will find a scapegoat, blame it on them, fire them, then vow to change things around. But that won't bring things back to the way they were.

The biggest problem with facebook is not that it mishandles data, that's an important issue for sure. But the main problem is that it changed us.

Because of facebook, and it's influence in designing all other platforms, it became second nature to share private data on a public platform. A large number of us use facebook as their primary and only source of news. We access the web through facebook.

Facebook will go away one day, but we will be on instagram instead. When instagram goes away, we will go on Whatsapp. Whatsapp will upgrade to have a feed where you can scroll forever and consume content. When they go, we will jump on the next platform, forever consuming content the exact same way without ever knowing what the controller of the platform does in the background.

We fix Facebook by changing our own ways. Without us, the data we post and the attention we give them for free, there is no Facebook. In fact, there isn’t a twitter either, or any platform that is powered by us.

What is user generated content when there is no user? Don’t forget that you hold that power.