I don’t hate Facebook

On October 4th, Facebook and its family apps Instagram, and WhatsApp all down for almost a whole day, that’s incredible. I saw a lot of elation in my Twitter timeline, it seems a lot of people dislike Facebook, it makes me sad. I was never a big fan of Facebook, or social network in that regard, but I do feel its service gives us more good than harm (not like those Twitter celebrities say the best FB can do is like this shut down its service, ofc I’m paraphrasing).

Walled Garden

I first heard people expressed disgust towards Facebook was John Gruber in his talkshow, his main idea was that FB stands the opposite side of open web, it purposefully blocks any crawler, search engines can’t index any content inside Facebook, thus it buidls a walled garden, and keep customers in its ecosystem.

Of course I don’t like that, nobody like being constrainted to a for-profit company’s ecosystem, the more we being constrained to a company, the more we could lose, not matter how good service or product they provide. But it’s not an uncommon practice for business. Like Apple for instance, they are also trying really hard to limit its customers in their Apple only ecosystem. So does Google, though we feel like we hop on and off in Google search like a breeze, but we can’t help but coming back to google all the time, and it’s not a secret they put their own service in front page of search result.

I guess most people have a natural distaste towards Facebook’s social network monopoly, almost everybody knows monopoly is bad, it was uncanny that FB acquired Ins and WhatsApp before they became a threat, and so FTC could approve its acquisition. I’m still glad we have Snapchat, Twitter and other small services as alternatives.

Censorship

It’s not doubt contents from its platform as “pure” as from China media, no brutality, porn or hate etc, very much family friendly, though you can still criticize government or public policy in any kind. I’ve never been a fan of censorship, I enojy stumble on explicit photo/vidoes or porn in Twitter every now and then, but I think the modernation is mild and acceptable.

Addiction

Criticizing the addiction of social media has seem to be another kind of PC nowadays. Come on, I’m sure people wowuld addict on millions of other things inevitably, it’s not FB’s fault, the most current one is Tiktok and those short video platforms, I often lost time on it as well.

In the end

I like the glamorous abundances in Instagram, I like the chap affordable items in FB market place, the FB nerborhood feature, the Dating feature etc. I do think they provide me lots of value.

I think it’s cynical to say FB don’t provide value to our society. I do hope we could break the monopoly FB controls, that would be better for everyone.