The Facebook Monopoly

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I am tired of the Facebook monopoly. While Google gets fined for helping people shop websites like Facebook do the opposite. Instead of increasing the diversity of content on the web and the sharing of ideas it has helped create silos of like minded people. Likeminded people is a polite way of saying brainwashed in the case where opinions are based on opinions rather than facts.

Low value posts

Shorts on Facebook are usually very short. You skim through dozens, even hundreds of posts but none of them have much value. Compare this to blogging. When you blog you need to develop ideas that you can expand to at least three hundred words. With those three hundred words you can include images, video, tables and more. You can tell a complete story. On Facebook you post some text and people might read it.

Conversational monopoly

People use twitter both privately and publicly. People I follow have their accounts set to private so I am careful not to answer to certain comments to preserve their private sphere. Other people see no value in having a public chat. They don’t remember the chatrooms on the late 1990s in the same way that I don’t remember party lines. Whatsapp and Messenger are used instead. Both of them allow private group chats from the comfort of a computer or with the mobility of a mobile phone. Ingress, Pokemon Go and others are happy to experiment with other platforms but mid to late adopters are stuck in the Facebook universe. They have a monopoly.

Picture sharing

Instagram is a great image sharing app but it’s owned by Facebook.

Events

Almost every event you go to these days has a Facebook events page. Many events only have a Facebook page. Unless you are a Facebook user you miss out on a lot of events.

 

The World Wide Web offers such a breadth of opportunities for creativity that it’s a shame that people are spending time on Facebook rather than on more malleable social networks. I’m thinking of WordPress as one example. We will see whether people go back to blog friendly social networks.