Popular Facebook has become a hellscape

Hussein Kesvani, The Independent

A few days ago, I had to log in to Facebook in order to wish a relative a happy birthday. Like most millennials, I rarely use the platform other than to keep in touch with some family and friends, or look for secondhand furniture in the local marketplace.

My account hadn’t been used for close to a year. Logging in required me to change my password, verify my identity through a defunct email address, and agree to three different sets of terms and conditions. Sending a birthday message should have been simple. After all, part of Facebook’s appeal when I first signed up for an account in 2008 was its cleanness, its uniformity, its ease of communication — a far stretch from the clutter of Myspace and Bebo.

Yet, for close to half an hour, I scoured a friend’s Facebook page — which was covered in articles from fake news websites, gambling ads and scores from Facebook games he’d been playing — to look for a place to send a public message. I also wasn’t sure if he was still using his Facebook account, as neither the posts or pictures on his Facebook wall were listed chronologically, while some of the posts, shared from other accounts and groups, seemed uncharacteristic of him, implying that his account might have been hacked.

This weird arrangement of posts, videos, shares and likes weren’t just limited to his account either — it had happened to my dormant account too. Browsing through my profile, I found that my Facebook feed had been filled with updates from Facebook groups I had no memory of joining: some of which had changed from meme pages and local community groups to pages advertising cryptocurrency scams, pyramid schemes aimed at stay-at-home mothers, deepfake gifs of celebrities, and strange viral videos.

The Facebook I had joined in my late teens and documented my early twenties in — the one that was instrumental to forging my friendships and relationships — was long gone. Instead, I found myself in a weird digital dystopia: one that contained fragments of my past but was enmeshed in an amalgamation of strange and bizarre content that bore no resemblance to my current life at all. It turns out that this problem is extremely common for Facebook users. News headlines often focus on Facebook’s political effects — from misinformation and promoting extremism, to its scant regard for the protection of user data. But, on a superficial level, Facebook as a platform… sucks.

As a recent Forbes article, in which the writer Paul Tassi struggles to figure out why he’s seeing and reading content that he was neither tagged in nor subscribed to, puts it: “It’s just a very, very exhausting and irritating platform to consume and utilise… It’s increasingly useless for what it was originally intended to be.”

Facebook’s mess is partly the result of its dependence on automation, and having a penchant for changing and altering its content recommendation algorithms. In 2015, Mark Zuckerberg announced that the platform would be concentrating its resources on video-based content, leading to news websites restructuring, laying off thousands of people to make way for a video revolution that never happened. A few years later, realising that the strategy to become a news publisher was doomed to fail, the platform attempted and failed to launch a cryptocurrency, before trying to once again restructure its news feed, focusing on “groups” and “social connectivity” rather than news and entertainment. Its restructuring meant that an automated algorithm would recommend content it believed a user’s close friends were engaging with — perhaps a good idea in theory, but one that failed in practice, as the platform’s content creators realised they could easily manipulate views and shares by posting videos across an unlimited number of pages of their own.

It might be easy to dismiss Facebook — to assume that, like Myspace, Bebo and Friendster before it, the platform will die a quiet death as we move on to different ones, or even get off social media entirely. But, while Facebook’s user experience might be disorientating, it still remains the biggest social media platform in the world, with close to 3 billion daily active users, most of whom use it as their primary means of social communication.