Facebook - Stop changing, start improving

For most of us, using Facebook and logging onto Facebook whenever, wherever we go is almost second nature. In essence, Facebook is a second life. Everyone has a different use case for Facebook, but I think I can safely say that Facebook's core appeal lies in the ability to share sentiments, have group discussions and contact friends. Having said that, a certain frustration with Facebook has grown on me in the past month that I haven't quite been able to pinpoint. But the launch of Google+ has helped to bring light to the cause: Facebook stopped innovating and started changing.

I'm the kind of guy that embraces change. I believe it's safe for me to say that I'm an early adopter of new technology, I love the excitement. What Facebook is doing isn't change for the better, but change for the sake of it, and nobody likes alterations in things they're accustomed to when it doesn't bring anything of notable value to the table. The first time that a so called improvement really bugged me was when Facebook decided to combine arbitrary matters like my friends 'likes' with the all-important status updates and wallposts in the news feeds. The term 'news feeds' immediately became redundant because it was no longer a stream of my friends connections but a water slide of spam and junk. Scavenging for the social  networking aspects amidst all of the 'likes' was parallel to finding a needle in a haystack. Little did I know, this very event augured a landslide of alterations and tweakings in Facebook of use to bloody no one. Suddenly, a glance at the Facebook interface doesn't quite give you a clear picture as to what the service is. Underneath all of the scum, 'social' seems to have become an afterthought. 

The simple fact is nobody really cares what pages someone likes, and I don't personally care who changes their profile pictures or who becomes friends with who. I admit, some of the like pages are pretty funny, but there's the burning question of why. Why do we have these like pages? We get a brief laugh, and then when we realise that we can relate them to our life we give them a like, and then someone else sees that we liked it and then they like it. It's a cyclical process with no higher destination. The only person that wins is the page owner who gets the satisfaction of seeing his stats fly. Personally, I don't like these 'like' pages anymore because I know that the only cause I'll be serving is spamming someone else's news feeds, and nobody wants that. Sure, I can hit 'top news' and filter my news feeds to a collection of popular statuses and wall posts, but it doesn't provide me with recent content, just popular content. Why won't Facebook just give us a function that allows us to filter out the spam? Why won't Facebook fulfil the desires of people like me, who want to use Facebook for what it was meant to be - sharing with friends instead of inadvertently sharing junk. 

This Facebook rant wouldn't be complete without the glaring topic of the dislike button. The haunting dream of every single user, that Facebook simply refuses to acknowledge. Why? Because they don't have to. There could be issues of cyber-bullying revolving around disliking, but really, what has this world turned to? Expressing disapproval for a topic, thought or event is not hurtful or harrassing, and if you think it is, then you shouldn't be on Facebook because swear words which run rampant in 'like' pages and comments are far worse than simply saying no. By not providing users with a dislike button, Facebook are breeding a culture where its expected to simply say yes and accept, and they're closing the door on another means of expressing ourselves which is the central point of what a social network is meant to be. 

Facebook's behaviour seems like a public but subtle display of arrogance. Facebook knows that we are trapped in their service because in social we can only go where our friends go. I get the feeling that we, the users are nothing more than just subjects for experimentation, Facebook makes a change and they observe how we react. But we're ultimately powerless. The users want a new feature, but Facebook doesn't deliver because heck, they don't have to. We have no viable alternatives to shift to, and if there were alternatives it would take monumental leadership to move a whole friendship community to an entirely new service. 

Even Gizmodo knows that the new chat is a complete abomination

To throw oxygen into the Facebook conflagration, the new excuse for 'chat' is an absolute nightmare. There's an old saying that you've undoubtedly heard that goes by the way of 'don't fix it if it ain't broke'. This generally ideology is against progression, so in most cases I vehemently dismiss it but Facebook could learn a thing or two. For those of you lucky enough to not have been downgraded to the new chat, I envy you, but for those of you who have, we share our hatred. The new chat sidebar, is a sidebar that remains on the right of your screen permanently, unless you care to make the extra two clicks to make it go away. It's not like the old chat, where you click to bring it up, and clicking away minimises it once again. The remaining presence of the new chat is obnoxious, and gives the whole interface a disturbingly asymmetrical feel. Not only that, but the list is no longer scrollable. Meaning that it only has the ability to show a finite number of online friends which is ultimately decided by the pixel density of your display. For anyone else you want to talk to that doesn't fit on the list, you must search them. What an absolute affront! Does Facebook really believe that we go into Facebook with intention? When I log onto Facebook, I just log on. I don't list intentions and goals beforehand - hmm, today I'm going to log onto Facebook so I can talk to blah-blah and message blah-blah and tag blah-blah in a photo. No, nobody does that. I use the chat box to see who's online and decide who I want to chat with based on who I see online. It's a matter of spontaneity, and by forcing us to methodically search potential chat companions is a gross removal of the whole impromptu factor of social altogether, which is an integral element.

Finally, there are the little tweaks too, that aren't necessarily game-changingly bad but vitiate needlessly the experience and familiarity users have with the interface. The more salient of such offences was when Facebook decided to make the font of the whole interface just a hair smaller. I thought there was some issue with my display resolution or the zoom of the webpage but it was just Facebook, being, well, Facebook. We've all adapted to the font size now but the change was never necessary in the first place and hasn't added anything to the service. It's a perfect example of the restless engineer bored of seeing stats fly.

If Google+ is here to prove anything, then it's the fact that Facebook is doing it all wrong. They're spamming our news feeds, annoying the users and just not being social enough. Let's hope that Google+ will act as an impetus for improvement for Facebook, because these last two years have just been one major digression, changing this and changing that to create the illusion of progress and improvement where we're really not moving anywhere. All I'm requesting of Facebook isn't anything new, more importantly, it's back to the old.