When you purchase a book, you expect the entire book to be there, right? Imagine if Facebook was a book publisher. Facebook would cut out certain parts of the book and not allow readers to see them. With every book, you wouldn’t know what parts of the book were missing. It would be completely random.
That’s what Facebook currently does with your news stream on Facebook. They pick and choose what you get to see. Even if you make a short list of people where you want to see every single post, Facebook will still cut out posts. You will never know what’s missing.
Mark Cuban has moved his business away from Facebook for this very reason. I’m a bit surprised by Techcrunch defending Facebook over Mark Cuban. To Techcrunch’s point, yes, Facebook is a business, so yes it needs to make money. But I would argue the people and the users put way more value into Facebook than what Facebook gives back. It’s disgusting for Facebook to charge companies money so readers will see their posts.
If Facebook was legit, they would allow people the option to view ALL content in their list. But no, Facebook instead doesn’t want to give people the option to view what they want. Facebook wants to act like a tv station choose what you get to see. That’s old media.
New media puts the user in control. New media allows the user to see everything. New media is a platform that enables the user, not disables the user.
Maybe I’m too used to Google Reader where I subscribe to content and I get it all. Yes google does give me this service for free. Does Google get to pick and choose what to show me? No. Does Facebook? Yes. If Google ever decided to start making Google reader act like Facebook, then I would leave Google Reader and start using a platform like NetNewsWire.
I’ve been using Facebook less and less over the past year, because I don’t like their practices of limiting the content we can see. Now I will grant them this point, there are many many people out there who don’t want to make a list of what they want to see. They just want simple content fed to them. There are many spoon-feeders out there.
But I would also argue there are many people who don’t want things spoon-fed to them. I believe our online audiences are sophisticated enough now to pick what they want to see. Facebook doesn’t allow us to pick. They give the ILLUSION that we get to pick. We get to “like” a Page. We get to “like” certain posts. That influences if that Page will show up in our feed. But the problem is that we still don’t get everything. And that’s wrong. That’s not American. That’s censorship. That’s not the internet. That’s old school broadcasting and newspapers.
Facebook, Twitter, Craigslist: All companies who limit innovation on their platform. A great article: http://observer.com/2012/09/broken-on-purpose/
It’s great to see other industry experts have the same opinion:
“Facebook vs. Twitter: How do you like your social news feed, filtered or unfiltered?”
by Mathew Ingram
http://gigaom.com/2013/03/07/facebook-vs-twitter-how-do-you-like-your-social-news-feed-filtered-or-unfiltered/
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