How Facebook can become useful again

Keiran King, Online Columnist

When
I signed up on February 22, 2005, TheFacebook.com had one purpose (and
one million users). There was no Like button, no App Center, no News
Feed. It was just a directory, a digital phonebook of young college faces and contact information. Instead of coding your own gaudy website on GeoCities,
Mark Zuckerberg’s fledgling company gave you a handsome profile in
royal blue, with links to your schoolmates.  That was it — you couldn’t
even add photos. It was simple, straightforward and useful.

Fast-forward. On its 10th anniversary, Facebook is the most populous service in human history (1.3 billion users, or 1/6th of the planet). It allows you to share everything, absorbing a staggering 15 million pictures,
200 million links and 400 million messages in 70 languages every single
hour. And it’s everywhere — installed on all your devices, embedded in
all your favourite sites. By any measure, an unstoppable global hegemon.

Except
for one thing. I’ve stopped using it, and if you have life goals, so
have you. The ubiquitous social network has devolved into a sewage
stream of shameless clickbait (You Won’t Believe What This Supermodel
Did!), derivative videos (LeBroning et al), and banal comments on banal events — in other words, a complete waste of time. 

Anything
of interest is quickly buried in an avalanche of notifications and
invitations. (Joseph likes Mary’s photo! Judas gave a life in Candy
Crush Saga! Peter and Paul are now friends!) Far from strengthening our
social networks, Facebook has reverted us into obsessive, narcissistic
tweenagers, endlessly preening and passing notes in some vapid virtual classroom.

I’m not alone. Despite its unprecedented scale, Facebook is haemorrhaging millennials by the millions, the
very demographic it initially bewitched. This is what economists call a
leading indicator. Like birds responding to barometric pressure before a
hurricane, this defection of youngsters suggests a coming crisis for
the Big Blue app.

Mr Zuckerberg sees the danger. In 2012, Facebook bought Instagram, the photo-sharing service with
100 million users. In February, it acquired the chat service WhatsApp
for an eye-watering US$19 billion (roughly Jamaica’s GDP), even though
it has its own Messenger app. In addition to spending its way into
continued relevance, the company’s recent efforts deliberately hide their parentage —
like the smartphone app Paper, which integrates your News Feed into a
magazine layout. The subtext seems to be a tacit admission that its core
product — the Facebook social network — is broken.

To fix it, let’s take a peek under the hood. Facebook assigns a score to every post depending
on its kind (photo, status update, and so on).  It also bumps the
score, like a biased professor, if the post is from someone you share
with often. Then it populates your feed with the high-scoring posts. But
even with bright engineers, constantly tweaking the formula,
a visit to Facebook is still an exercise in skimming and scrolling, as
you separate the wheat from the chaff yourself. And there’s a lot of
chaff.

On the
community news service Reddit, by contrast, users directly vote other
users’ posts up and down (somewhat akin to clicking Like buttons). The
content most valued in individual networks, or subreddits, bubbles to
the top; the least valued sinks to the bottom. If a post is boosted
enough, it bumps on to a global list, which Reddit calls 'the front page
of the Internet'. Each user sees that page and whichever subreddits
interest her. In other words, Reddit shows you its best stuff right
away, every time you visit, and scrolling yields diminishing returns.
 Zero chaff.

To
regain its mojo, Facebook needs to overcome its moral queasiness and
borrow Reddit's meritocracy. Introduce a Dislike button, and treat our
upvotes and downvotes not as independent actions, but as collective
referenda on each other’s posts and photos. Of course, your feed will
still reflect your interests and relationships, but judgement on
individual posts will be swift, ruthless and efficient.

Instantly,
Facebook would stop being that thing you do when you should be doing
something else, and start being genuinely useful again.  But if you’re
undecided whether this is a good idea, share it on Reddit. One way or another, in a few hours you’ll have your answer.

Keiran King is a writer and producer. His column appears every Wednesday.  Find him on Twitter @keiranwking. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and yell@keiranking.com.