It’s not a secret that I’ve always had a bad relationship with Facebook, but after so many years I can safely say that the more I use it, the more it’s clear how Facebook itself is actively trying to obstruct my enjoyment of it.
The Infamous Algorithm
Might as well start with the worst offender.
Not even once in almost 10 years I’ve felt that it catered to my interests.
My feed is a mess of stuff I don’t care for, and I’m not sure why Facebook would think otherwise.
Friends liking posts on pages I’ve never heard before? Events on the other side of the planet? Recommended posts spamming products I loathe? The dreadful Marketplace boxes I’ve been trying to hide for months without success? All the damn football-related pages my friends are into but I’m definitely not and I’ve barely ever posted about?
Facebook makes sure these things always pop up in my feed, creating a deafening white noise that forces me to dumbly scroll past everything all the time, often skipping what I’d be actually willing to read.
What I don’t see on Facebook anymore are all those old buddies with whom I don’t hang out with anymore for some reason or another, but that I’d love to hear more about, to see what they’re up to these days.
Literally, I never get to see their posts, unless I actively go check out their profiles.
I mean, who cares for these people when I can read the usual racist bullshit barrage from some random elementary school classmates I hated back then and obviously my feelings are unchanged right now?
The Non-Reproducibility
This is probably what I hate the most about Facebook: refreshing the feed returns different posts in different order.
Why?
I mean, besides making my life miserable?
Like, you open Facebook and surprise! The first post is actually one of those super rare posts worth reading!
But nope. Facebook instantly refreshes the feed, everything changes, and that post is lost forever.
On mobile it’s even worse. Hit the back button twice instead of once and instead of heading back to the same position you were before, here you are back on top of the feed, looking at never-seen-before posts from one week ago.
I might be the unluckiest person on earth, but it feels to me this is something that happens almost every single time.
Why, I said?
The only reason I can find is that Facebook needs us dumbly scrolling forever, searching for something that might not be there anymore.
The ever-changing feed makes us think that there’s always fresh content to read (or skim through).
The constant spam of pages interacted by friends, even when wildly outside our sphere of interests, is exactly what it is: spam.
The Actual Spam
And finally the sort-of-titular rant.
I’m an ad blocker user (actually, an uBlock Origin user) for many, many reasons.
I’m not against ads per se, but I’m really, really against ads that make it really, really hard to use a website.
Pop-ups, pop-unders, ads covering the content, interstitial ads, ads that take a lifetime to load on mobile. I hate them all and I feel zero regrets in blocking every ads everywhere—except the handful of sites in my uBlock whitelist.
Facebook ads are different though.
Facebook ads are not intrusive and never obviously prevent the fruition of the actual content.
Facebook ads are the content.
They look and behave the same as normal posts from normal users. Most of the time they blatantly advertise something so you can recognize them right away, but sometimes they are more subtle and require more thought (something that I’d rather not use on Facebook, to save it for other more interesting stuff) in the “automatic ads filtering” process our brains are now used to perform all the time.
Unfortunately, the fact that they look and behave the same as normal posts means that their very code might have no obvious markers, and blocking them might be hard or even impossible (not yet though!).
I had to deeply study the HTML structure of the Facebook feed to finally find out a selector good enough to hide all those pesky recommended posts, and I had to do it several times now, because Facebook changes it every now and then.
The Clutter
Let me reiterate this: using Facebook is not fun.
This is not only because it’s not clear how it works and what it shows, and because it assumes too much about our interests—which might very well be different than our friends’ interests.
But also because of all the clutter on screen, the sheer amount of negligible information that it throws at us at all times.
A new-ish example of this is the Android app notification screen.
More than half of it (the top half, even!) is filled with a “people you may know” list, mostly containing people I’ve never heard of, with apparently zero ties to me.
This list usually is a fraction of second slower to load than the notification list, so here I am, with the intent of hitting the first notification, but instead hitting the first person I may know (but I really don’t).
Again, why? “Notifications” has a very precise meaning, and it is definitely not “list of random people instead of actual notifications”.
Also, using Facebook seems to keep all of us in a permanent state of A/B testing.
No 2 days are the same on Facebook! Recently I’ve been placed several times in and out of the (quite appreciated actually) “bigger text” trial.
If I actually cared, I could list many more blatant A/B tests I’ve underwent. I don’t though, so this is the only one my faint memory is allowed to remember.
Hypocrisy
I could leave Facebook once and for all.
I wouldn’t be the first nor the last, and I’d be in a pretty good company.
But I won’t.
I live abroad and Facebook is basically the last way left for me to stay in touch with friends back in Italy or themselves abroad.
Though, my last post on Facebook is from more than 2 months ago now.
I still comment, and like, and react, and of course dumbly scroll for an absurd amount of time every day, but I don’t write anything myself.
There are better outlets for me to express myself, and definitely Facebook isn’t the right fit right now. Possibly forever.
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