By: Tim Hall

Tim Hall — Wed, 22 Jan 2014 23:10:12 +0000

At the moment Facebook keeps changing what it wants to be. At one point it was all about status updates, then they decided people who didn’t have anything to say wanted to share stuff, so they increased the emphasis on pictures. Then everyones feeds got flooded with low-quality platitude memes and people started disengaging…

There was a time when Facebook wanted to eat the web, and every website had it’s own app, until everyone had suffered one spammy malware app too many and stopped trusting the things.

Now they want to be curators of web content and encourage people to share links. Except instead of high-quality news articles everyone wants to share emotionally appealing low-quality crap from viral content farms like Buzzfeed and Upworthy.

I know I’m sounding like a grumpy old man, but I hate all this rubbish…

By: Serdar

Serdar — Wed, 22 Jan 2014 20:56:17 +0000

What I want most out of an online forum, I think, are two things: civility of discourse and openness of the platform. In other words, I don’t care if the people in question are on the other side of the table from me; what I care about is how they make their case. If they resort to invective or spluttering sophomoric insult, there’s no discussion. Facebook is bad for discussion not just because it walls in the discussion, but because it becomes increasingly easy to wall yourself in with people who only think and talk like you.

The second part of the equation should also be obvious, inasmuch as it relates to Facebook.

Comments on: Is Facebook approaching the tipping point?

By: Tim Hall

By: Serdar