Author Archives: Tim Hall

A Programmer’s Tale thinks the Facebook experiment has failed. The suggestion is that problem is Facebook’s emphasis on sharing rather than creating original content.

Facebook is godsent for people who love to talk, but have nothing to say. Here is a network that doesn’t care about originality or the quality of content. In the time it takes to create something original, they could share dozens of things.

There was a time when my feed was flooded with pictures which consisted of annoying platitudes superimposed on stock images and passive-aggressive someecards. Too many of these things originate from dodgy “like farms” run by spammers.

Inevitably, there is an entire industry working non-stop creating low quality, emotionally appealing content that gets ‘likes’ from gullible users.

Although looking at my own Facebook feed, the signal-to-noise ratio is nothing like as bad as described above. It may be that FB has improved their edgerank algorithm so that it no longer favours pictures over text the way it used to. Or it may simply be that I’ve unsubscribed from photos from a couple of dozen of the worst offenders for sharing low-quality content.

The conclusion is that we need to abandon Facebook in favour of returning to blogs and forums.

We need to go back to smaller communities. Where people aren’t lost in the mediocre averages of large networks. That’s where ideas flourish.

That’s one thing I don’t like about Facebook; the way it’s sucked the life out of other once thriving online communities. Whether it’s possible to go back to them, I don’t know. Many people say they appreciate the “one stop shop” approach of a social network rather than visiting dozens of different sites to check for new content.

The internet continues to evolved, and I’m beginning to think Facebook has peaked, and its day in the sun is over. What will replace it is anyone’s guess.