The Facebook ‘Like’ concept. It is used because it is there and not because it is desired; but this does not necessarily make it bad. So, I took time to explore it further. What is it? What is this new language, the exchange of ‘Liking’ that Facebook has created? ‘Likes’ have become some sort of collectable item and you cannot blame users for that. It feels like a game, maybe it is a game. Facebook has somehow managed to change the relationships between friends into a game. This is detrimental to the institution of friendship; and more importantly Facebook. By diluting the quality of interactions on offer to users, Facebook has fundamentally compromised their value.
Additionally, users have —on average— 130 friends, but you are not quite close enough (naturally!) to comment on the majority of the content they create, so we ‘Like’ what they post. In fact, Facebook encourages this with limited interaction subscriptions. It keeps you in the game, regardless of how well you know your ‘Friends’.
Facebook is illogical and inconsistent; the entire user experience is permeated with issues. However, most profoundly, hours upon hours of precious time are wasted processing the mundane trivia of total strangers See: http://relevancetesting.tumblr.com ; and that’s how Facebook operates. Of course, it is not Facebook’s priority to create a time-wasting heap of code, but alas here we are. This is their business model and they are willing to put $100 billion on it.
It’s rapidly becoming an insult to our intelligence and quite frankly, I think many of us are growing tired of it. I can see a time, not too far from now, when we’ll wonder what we were thinking with that thing called ‘Facebook’. For a company of their size, I am increasingly disappointed with their product. There is so much they could be doing to make FB a beautiful supplementation to life, but no, they are stuck with the junk. It’s a shame really.
