Why Facebook Sucks

1. It’s a platform for sharing text, pictures, and videos

Maybe 10 years ago that was a novel idea, and a hard thing to pull off. Today, it’s painfully obvious and easy. There are countless platforms that do the exact same thing. Each one just has a different gimmick and a design that emphasizes one of the three content types.

2. You can’t embed YouTube videos

Facebook has 40,000 people working full time at a median salary of $240,000 a year — on a website for sharing text, pictures, and videos — and you can’t embed YouTube videos.

40,000 employees. What are they doing? A/B testing ways to increase ad click-through rates from 0.8% to 0.9%? Deciding whether each flagged post in fact violates their convoluted policies?

3. Free speech? Let’s try something else

One day we’ll look back and laugh at how hard early social media sites worked to replace free speech. It’s an absurd endeavor, yet one that Facebook and everyone else are hell bent on.

Each platform has its own confusing and ever-changing policies, its own definition of harassment and hate speech, etc. This requires a sizable workforce to sift through billions of posts and decide which ones violates the rules. What a huge waste of time and money.

4. Every 4th post is a full-size ad

Again, Facebook lets you share text, pictures, and videos. For something so ubiquitous, why should we accept ads occupying ~25% of the displayed content?

(Also, bad for FB stock. They must be approaching the saturation point when it comes to spamming users with ads. I think that’s also true for Twitter, Google, and YouTube.)

Facebook sucks

Someone should program the same exact thing, with:

• No ads
• Free speech

and come up with some clever tools to make it easy for people to migrate over from Facebook.