The Case Against Facebook

There has been, if you will, a bit of a shift regarding people’s opinions of Facebook.

I’m currently completely logged out of it, in keeping with the boycott running between January 19 and 26. I’ll see how I feel about logging back into it after that. I have to admit that with a few specific exceptions (hi, Star Trek Shitposting) and, of course, my circle of actual acquaintances from real life, it hasn’t interested me as much as it used to.

There are a lot of articles and stories right now on what’s wrong with Facebook: the update to a new “relaxed” terms of service that refrains from restricting hate speech, the CEO’s willingness to embrace the new Presidential administration, etc. I have some pretty solid opinions on this (I actually started this blog after my first “comment didn’t follow Community Standards” suspension), but I don’t have much to add to that conversation.

No, what I want to comment on is that Facebook is a bad web app.

Facebook kinda sucks as a site

Facebook’s web app is bloated, slow, and unreliable. It uses (in Chrome) nearly a gigabyte of RAM, twice what my Mastodon site uses and over twenty times a plaintext site. I frequently get notifications for replies to comments that just won’t load; clicking on the notification links ot some random chunk of the comment thread that isn’t the reply to my comment. Reaction buttons sometimes partially load; they won’t show the reaction options or only allow for “like”. The full-page image view is hostile to browser accessibility; zooming in on the page causes the image to resize to be smaller. Automatic name insertion just triggers on random snippets of a person’s name, so as I type the UI is irritatingly insistent on trying to insert links to names when I’m just trying to type words.

On mobile, it’s particularly ill-behaved; half the time I visit it on my phone, it just doesn’t load, either hanging or showing a redirect error. The text editing box actively fights editing; whatever has been done to it from a formatting standpoint makes scrolling and text-selection awful. Replying to a comment in a thread doesn’t tag the person you’re replying to.

“So why don’t you use the mobile app?”

Ah. Good question.

It’s possible some of these issues on mobile would be addressed if I used the app. I had it installed ages ago, and it chewed through my phone battery; I haven’t installed it since. And, honestly… I don’t trust Meta enough to give it app-level access to my mobile device. To be fair, Android has updated their permisison model so it’s much harder to “default-on” permisisons the way you could back in the day; many of my concerns are probably addressed in that regard. But in general, I trust the browser permission model far more, still, than the mobile-app permission model.

Plus… The app has direct access to the OS notification infrastructure and Facebook was insistent last time I had it installed. It was pinging all the time. And yes, you can adjust those permissions too… I don’t want to. You know where I don’t have to adjust permissions? The web app, which doesn’t have the authority to ping my mobile notifications.

So I use Facebook through the web, and the web UI sucks.

Chasing the red dot

Even still… I kinda wish the notification bug could be turned off completely.

I remember when Facebook added notifications. They were annoying. Thinking about it, years later… They’ve never gotten less annoying. In fact, Meta seems to continue to try and dream up things to notify me about up there, so even if nothing important is happening they have an excuse to ping me. I can be a “top contributor” now. I can let someone know I commented on their page (as if the comment itself wasn’t serving that purpose). I’m even starting to see “Hey, remember this conversation?” in Facebook Messenger, which is just a messenger.

Nothing that happens on Facebook is urgent. The number of things I do there that should trigger a little red notification bug is zero. But I’m compelled to click when I see that little red dot. It’s a distraction.

It’s a distraction machine

It feels good to use Facebook, a lot of the time. You can see what people are doing, you get funny memes, you can connect with family. But what Facebook wants from you is viewing their ads, clicking on their ads, and spending money on showing ads. That only works if you stay on it, and the incentives are designed to keep you on it. When the day-to-day of your family isn’t enough, the algorithm will surface content to piss you off. I don’t necessarily believe it’s designed to intentionally, but I believe incentives are heavily structured to reward Facebook’s team for choosing this direction (unconsciously) whenever there’s ambiguity. So it’ll float topics you oppose and if you engage with them, it will tell the system you want more of that. Next thing you know, you can find yourself chasing your next argument, your next fight, your next opportunity to “own” someone. To what end? Nobody gets convinced of anything via a Facebook argument with a stranger.

My experience with Mastodon, in contrast, is nothing like that. Since I’m running the node, there’s no advertising to be had (what would I advertise to myself?) and if someone’s personal feed is becoming too advertising-like, I can mute them or unfollow. The tools for shaping who I follow are quite robust. And it’s fast. The pages aren’t weighed down with a billion tiny JavaScript components, so it loads about 7MB of resources (from browser cache) and 73kB of payload data in about 1.5 seconds (most of the delay being that I’m running it from a Raspberry Pi in the corner of a spare room). It has a notification bar, but it’s tunable and if I really wanted to, I could just delete it.

Alternatives

Facebook isn’t the only social network; it’s just one of the largest ones. I’ve been very much enjoying Mastodon (and you can follow me there. I don’t have a strong opinion on BlueSky. Twitter’s a hole and I left it in 2017. The hard part, of course, is that a social network is only as useful as the people you can connect to from it (and, here, Facebook fails again; I can follow people on BlueSky from Mastodon and vice-versa; Facebook does not let you connect to non-Facebook accounts). This is a good time, if you haven’t done so, to dip your toe in other networks. They have different ideas of what social networking is. Facebook has a very “big tent” rule where they are applying one set of Community Standards (modulo the legal requirements of every nation and the administration of individual groups under their Communit Standards) across the whole ecosystem of users; I’m not sure that’s actually tractable. It’s not how the world’s organized, and indeed when people try that across nations it has several names and most of them have negative connotations. Mastodon isn’t like that; nobody can tell a site owner what the rules should be for their site (other than other sites deciding it isn’t worth it to share traffic between them).

The case for Facebook

To be fair, Facebook has done some great things. They are a pretty nice place to connect to friends and loved ones you know IRL who are distant, physically. A well-moderated gronp can be an excellent experience. Though they’re cracking, I will nod with respect that the engineering required to host 2.1 billion daily active users is exceedingly non-trivial. And their architecture for making it easy to share information on events, find local events, and stay updated on them is probably the best I’ve seen; Mastodon has nothing like geographically-organized datasets, so doing that over there is a non-starter. Facebook Messenger is also extremely reliable.

I’m just not convinced those things are enough to keep me there. Not with the other technical, social, and design issues of the system.

There’s a lot changing right now. If you’ve been curious what else is out there besides Facebook, now’s a good time to dip your toe in. You don’t have to keep using the broken distraction machine.