Facebook paranoia

[haggholm]

A while back I seriously considered ceasing to use Facebook at all, because the interface redesign irked me and annoyed me so greatly. At the time, I simply ended up using custom CSS to hide the useless and obnoxious parts of the interface.

Since then, of course, the Facebook people have revamped various parts of the system at least twice. Generally, everybody seems to agree that it’s for the worse. At times it has rather puzzled me. Frequently, it has had me contemplating leaving.

Then I had a thought which, right or wrong, should have been extremely obvious, but wasn’t (to me) because I simply do not usually think in these terms:

I suspect that Facebook has outgrown catering to their users. The reason I haven’t left is, after all, not the site (which hovers between mildly and seriously annoying me), but simply that the userbase is so large—if nothing else, giving up on its event scheduling would be slightly crippling.

This makes me reflect that while a new social networking site has to offer a platform to attract people to form networks, Facebook has (long since) passed the point of critical mass where this dynamic changes: Now networks attract people to the platform, and no matter how much people may genuinely dislike the interface (beyond people who merely like to complain), this critical mass exerts its own irresistible attraction.

There seems little point, then, in modifying the interface to attract more users (who will come anyway since it’s where all the people are), let alone to improve the experience for existing users (why bother? We’re trapped by inertia anyway). Instead, perhaps the best business decision is to largely ignore user concerns and attempt to improve the experience for advertisers—making it easier for them to target ads, and so forth. Perhaps this is why all the recent privacy improvements have come with the Trojan payload of extremely permissive defaults…

Let me restate that: I consider it a possibility that Facebook may, and certainly for business purposes may profit from, a choice to focus on advertisers targeting their users rather than improving the user experience.

This is all pure speculation, perhaps paranoid; but not, I think, completely nonsensical.

Comments

[greenstorm.livejournal.com]

Would that even be surprising?

[petter-haggholm.livejournal.com]

Catering to advertisers is obvious. What’s surprising to me (with my geek’s mindset and preference to not even think of the business side, let alone advertising) is the thought that they might be at a point where they can gleefully shit all over their users because user experience no longer matters. Anyone but the giants, while still catering to advertisers, also has to cater to the users as well as the advertisers, after all, lest the captive audience make a break for it.