we're in an abusive relationship with facebook
let's just admit it already.
what was once a great user experience that connected us with everyone we had ever known and every single new person we met that (I'll admit) revolutionized the way we interact online, this relationship is going downhill and we need to face facts: it's just not good for us any more.
it changes our privacy and sharing options constantly (and resets them at random). it suggests weird and sometimes offensive ads based on what people in our feed say. it crashes (often). it's slow. it's become less about networking and sharing and more about ad revenue based on flash-based games and ads inserted into our news feeds. the only thing it is good at (event management) has fallen by the wayside so much that it's barely even worthwhile to use when there are third-party sites like MeetUp.com out there.
and now facebook is going to be bringing videos to our already overly-cluttered networking experience.
auto-playing, probably audio-enabled, full-window, at least 15-second-long videos.
and it does all of this so blatantly, flying in the face of a positive user experience. nobody wants to deal with ads or videos or intrusive weird privacy policies that we constantly have to police and re-correct to the way we want them, but the people behind facebook do it anyway because profit is more important than respecting the people who made your site what it is in the first place.
as a user of multiple social networking sites, this hits me like a drunken smack to the jaw. none of my other beloved sites would treat me this way! why am I letting facebook get away with it? why are we?!
because we're stuck in an abusive relationship with it. it's safe, it's easy, we can go back whenever we want and even though sometimes we get frustrated and upset with it, and it does things that hurt us (like completely disregard our user experience), at the end of the day we feel like we can't do any better.
which is the very definition of being in an abusive relationship.
we can do better, Internet.
