I'm an old(er) fart who has been watching the absolutely fascinating phenomenon of social media for decades. (Yes, I do mean decades -- Google "FidoNet" for interesting reading if you're into that dusty historical stuff. I arrived a little late in the game with my pokey 300-baud modem, but I was there. I even bought my first domain name when Network Solutions -- colloquially "NetSol" -- was still the only game in town. Network Solutions charged $70 a year per domain name and offered a horribly unintuitive user interface -- faugh!)
I've accumulated a few observations from watching the long rise of Google and Facebook as well as the rise and fall of other successful or not-so-successful social media and web search platforms such as AOL, MySpace, AltaVista, GeoCities, Twitter, Snapchat, etc., etc., etc. Shall I include hoary old Usenet in that list? It's virtually a tautology to attribute the wild success of the web to the absurd simplicity of posting a simple website with basic HTML tags. Nor does the swamping of the modern web with extremely complex frameworks meant to overcome profound design flaws in the web detract from this point.
Anyways. For whatever it's worth, I've noticed that once a web service, be it a search engine or a social media platform, moves beyond obviously useful and non-confusing features into self-important "lookit what we can do now" frippery, it starts losing its original appeal and eventually its regular visitors. Facebook currently holds immense power as the default destination for hundreds of millions of people, but the company isn't immune to the fickle mindsets of customers for its brand of free and paid services (advertising in particular). The recent antics of the ultra-liberal leaderships of Google, Facebook, and Twitter in subtly or obviously silencing prominent conservative and libertarian voices and thereby gradually alienating a wider audience constitute only one of several serious problems.
Possibly more critical to the futures of these companies is the constant, ruthless manipulation of their audiences for maximum profitability. Mind you -- I say "maximum" profitability and not an enlightened "optimum" profitability. The former is the attitude of a greedy robber baron, and the latter is the attitude of a cautious business that knows what its customers want. Put simply, Facebook and Twitter in particular have become seriously annoying. Google isn't all that far behind. Their hundreds of programmers scamper here and yon in an unending effort to add features with little regard to how they clutter up the user experience. Hey, they've got to justify their salaries. Students of private and government bureaucracies learn this in Governance and Corporate Culture 101.
Most people want to talk to their friends and share pictures and videos without having to fight and kick and struggle against manipulative, intrusive, self-serving algorithms that keep nudging and prodding them into buying this and that or forcing them to interact with their friends in certain ways and not others. Let's not even get into the absurdities of a grossly oversimplified "like" system at Facebook that permits no subtleties of approval or disapproval. Beyond a certain point -- don't ask me where that point lies -- they silently and almost invisibly become ready and willing in their tens of millions to to suddenly abandon an old, familiar platform for a better platform that does exactly what they want it to do and nothing further.
Please note the concept of "non-confusing," which isn't quite the same thing as the older and more limited concept of "user-friendly." "Non-confusing" encompasses everything about the user experience. It means the platform only does what it absolutely must for the mainstream experience while making side trips like photographic manipulation as obviously simple as possible -- in and out and done. Visual triggers are okay but only if they quietly hover in the background with nil annoying behavior like flashing, blinking, sliding, jittering, or anything else that sparks ancient brain reflexes against tigers stealthily sneaking up on a hapless and very edible monkey ancestor.
That slides naturally into "non-annoying" territory. It means not jerking people around with algorithmic weirdness meant to push them into buying stuff by utterly wearing them out. Ooh, look -- you've been discussing cutting the grass. Click here to bypass this annoying inline video on motorized lawnmowers. Wait! Wouldn't you like to know right now about the leading brand of high-end fertilizer for your lawn? Say, don't miss that flood of advertisements we'll be sending your way about super-terrific landscaping products across all subcategories for ensuring a lush, healthy lawn that makes your neighbors gasp in envy. Our customer-friendly network of deeply interconnected web trackers will ensure you cannot escape, so you might as well relax and enjoy them.
This kind of relentless stalking and harassment is tiring and discouraging. Selling stuff per se is okay, but taking advantage of a captive audience to inflict inherently abusive tactics is not okay at all. Forced auto-play videos, jiggling side boxes that grate like sandpaper on the brain, and the whole panoply of aggressive web marketing tactics just tick people off and make them yearn for a nicer alternative. I imagine the great majority of Slashdotters already ameliorate this problem with a custom "hosts" file, JavaScript-control browser plugins such as QuickJava, tracker-control plugins such as Ghostery, advertising-control plugins such as uBlock Origin, and so forth. Most folks ain't quite that wired, though. They just feel the pain all day. BTW, before you scold me, I know I'm behind the times on plugins. Please do suggest better alternatives if you have some in mind.
I think that's enough for now. I won't even go into personal reputation control or the ongoing uproar over extremely liberal data sharing practices amongst Big Data firms that even the Wonderful Wizard of Oz would have trouble grasping. I'm sure I'm missing a laundry list of even more urgent problems.
Too long, didn't read: Facebook (and Twitter to a lesser extent) are now too complicated, too annoyingly self-serving, and too confusing. Plus, they gleefully shadow-ban or outright kick conservatives and libertarians. Watch for an abrupt market replacement for Facebook and Twitter to erupt from the shadows. Google will suffer too but not as quickly. Its search-engine interface is still simple, and its results are increasingly biased but not so obviously that the company will soon lose visitors en masse. Bonus thought: Google has so many other irons in the fire that it's not going anywhere near bankruptcy in the foreseeable future even if it somehow stumbles badly in search.
Yeah, okay. I spent too much time writing this instead of working. Maybe I'll program that abrupt replacement for the web giants and chuckle all the way to the bank. Will vodka help? Only one way to find out!