What follows is an adaption of my final Facebook post to a form that suits this blog.

I recently deleted my Facebook account, and will no longer use commerical products made by Facebook. I did not do this purely for humanitarian reasons, nor purely for selfish reasons.

Facebook has achieved quite a lot of power in society in exchange for a rather poor product. There are a lot of extremely powerful companies and poor products in the world but Facebook takes the cake on both dimensions.

The Product

The News Feed is terrible, because it optimizes for engagement, not happiness. Back when I used it, it would often aggravating to read because that’s how you make money advertising. It is also not optimizing for meaning, nuance, truth or good style. All must be sacrificed for engagement.

As a writing medium, it is much less expressive than normal HTML.

Messenger is fine, but not at all special technologically. The only reason these services are used so widely is that “everyone” uses them.

The Power

Facebook is using its social graph, control over the News Feed and its users personal information in destructive ways.

• Censorship of posts according to their own internal standards, independent of any law or user’s wishes. It is within Facebook’s rights: their platform is their property. But considering how many people get their news from Facebook it is harmful.
• Attempting to pass off the very subjective choices of its staff as a neutral, popularity-based “Trending News” section.
• Ranking non-censored posts according to an opaque algorithm in the News Feed. Is it good? Is it bad? Actually, everyone’s feed is different and the algorithm is secret so good luck evaluating it in any way. I hear a lot of podcasters and the like complain about their posts remaining unseen by fans.
• Taking all the advertising revenue from pirated videos.
• Attempting to control the internet in third world countries, to the benefit of their partners, under the guise of being helpful.

A lot of these issues are less about the strict action and more about the message behind them. How obvious is it that companies are paying to be in your “News Feed”? Or that human staffers are trying to out-hip Twitter in your “Trending News”? Or that “internet.org” is not some humanitarian mission but a massive market grab?

Conclusion

There is another major tech giant amassing personal information and gaining power over what people think. Ending my use of their products will be difficult: their services are rather good and have permeated my life. On the other hand, people more involved than I have quit just to prove that they can.

The role Facebook Messenger played in my life is now filled by email, SMS, and 8 different chat apps. The role Facebook News Feed played was… minimal in recent months. I had been pretty annoyed at News Feed for a very long time.

Here’s what I had to say (on Facebook) over three years ago about the News Feed:

Image credit: Ratan Abraham Varghese

This Friendship Day, let Facebook decide which of your friends is most important using its cold algorithmic analysis!

Because who cares what actually happened to your friends recently? The important thing is that you see that “Top Story” you already saw yesterday again!

And guess what?

This setting is the default! And will reset itself every few days!

Happy friendship day, people who (Facebook decided) consider my stories “Top”!