Four features that would tame Facebook

Even at the weakest and most embattled moment in its history, Facebook still seems inescapable. It’s impossible to leave, as Sarah Jeong detailed last week, and it seems even harder to fix. Facebook has rolled out products like Clear History to deal with data privacy complaints and new ad transparency measures to deal with influence campaigns. But so far, no one’s suggested anything that will make it any easier to leave Facebook or to pare back its role in our lives. If your complaint is that Facebook is simply too powerful, the company has done very little to reassure you.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Facebook’s dominance is the result of specific product choices, and there are other products that would undo those choices. We’re so used to platforms acting to entrench their own power that it’s become unthinkable that they’d act any other way. But from a product perspective, the features are simple, drawn from open protocols like email, RSS, and the web itself. If Facebook followed their lead, it would become less powerful, sure, but also less invasive and foreboding, a friendlier presence in the online space.

I’m not optimistic that Facebook will offer any of these features, although you never know. Beyond that, we have no clear legal mechanisms for forcing Facebook into this way of doing business, outside of a significant political shift in either the Department of Justice or Federal Trade Commission. It would mean treating Facebook more like a utility than a business, and probably vaporizing billions in shareholder value along the way. Even then, this wouldn’t address every problem with Facebook, leaving serious complaints about information diets and data privacy more or less untouched.

But the hardest problem — the oppressive stickiness of Facebook itself — would be surprisingly simple to solve. Here’s what it would take:

Dummy Profiles

One of the biggest problems with leaving Facebook is the possibility that someone might search for you and find nothing there. At the same time, if you stop using Facebook but leave your profile active, there’s no easy way to indicate to passersby that you don’t check the profile anymore. There’s no easy way out, and it’s hard to make a clean break.

This would be easy to fix. When a user leaves Facebook, give them the option of putting up a simple page letting visitors know they’ve left and where else they can be reached, akin to Netflix’s “we don’t have this movie” page. Facebook is a massive directory of people, and a person should be able to give up the product without leaving the directory. On a secondary social network like LinkedIn, dummy profiles might seem spammy. But it really is rare for someone to not be on Facebook, and it usually means they’ve left on purpose.

In some ways, Facebook is already doing this. If I deleted my profile tomorrow, Facebook’s database would still retain some record of my existence and my friends, if only because it needs to categorize contacts data from people who know me. These are the infamous Shadow Profiles, but they’re only shadowy because they aren’t visible to users. If you make them visible, the whole network will start to seem a little friendlier and a little more transparent.

Message forwarding

More common than shutting down your Facebook account is simply abandoning it, avoiding the app for months on end. But if you stay away for any length of time, you’ll come back to the digital equivalent of a pile of unopened mail: direct messages you never saw, invitations you never got, and everything else that happened on Facebook while you were away. Because of the closed nature of Facebook, there’s no robust way to see those messages without logging in, which is a big part of what keeps us coming back.

It would be easy to change that. Think of it like email: send everything that comes to my Facebook account in a weekly email or my Peach inbox or some other place of my choosing. This would work very differently than the current “checking in” emails, which simply tell you “someone sent you a message on Facebook” that ask you to log in to see more. The point here is a full forward, letting you see all the information that’s sent to you via Facebook without you ever logging into Facebook itself.

Independent apps for posting

Facebook has a great network, but the actual tools for posting aren’t particularly useful. Someone else could probably do better, especially if they were building something that posted to multiple networks at once. A third-party app also lets you post something to your Facebook without getting drawn into the other parts of the site. There are lots of ways to do this on other services, whether it’s something as simple as an IFTTT tag or as involved as Twitter’s short-lived Engage app. Even camera apps have a version of this, letting you send photos out to Facebook even if you don’t have the app on your phone. But more advanced apps like this are out of fashion in the startup world, in part because there’s no way to keep platforms from killing them off. (Pray for Tweetbot.)

It’s hard to say how best to protect developers here, particularly since blocking abusive apps is an important part of the broader fight against fraud and abuse on the network. But giving developers a little more protection could have a powerful effect on the broader ecosystem, opening the door for multinetwork distribution and a more federated version of social media overall. You can see versions of this in distributed apps like Mastodon, where a single client can post multiple instances at once. You’d start to see more competition between clients and far less lock-in within networks. Everybody wins — except maybe Zuck.

Exportable News Feed data

Once you can send things to your Facebook, the next question is how you get things out. Direct messages are simple to forward along, but to use Sarah’s example, that won’t tell you that your friend is getting married. That information lives on the News Feed, and the News Feed is more complicated. It’s Facebook’s core product, and the hardest one to untangle. The posts you see there are so reliant on algorithms that it would be hard to export. You couldn’t even really ask for a single version of what the News Feed would show you over a given time. It’s just too fluid.

But what if you could export certain aspects of the News Feed, like all your friends’ life events or all the updates from specific groups? Even if we can’t ask for a perfect facsimile of the News Feed, we can still play with the component parts. You could also think of it as a real-time version of the same data exporting mandated by the GDPR — requiring portability as a stream rather than a single chunk of data. The stream could be personal posts by friends, or commonly shared news articles, anything that would let third-party developers dig in and create something new. The point here isn’t just to open the door for developers and better Facebook hacks (although we’d get that, too), but to create some distance between Facebook’s tools and the data on its network so that the tools have value beyond getting you to use Facebook more.

It’s hard to know how to think about this open version of Facebook. It may just be a fantasy, a series of features the company probably isn’t going to implement, bringing about an end goal it actively opposes. Facebook doesn’t want to become a dumb pipe or a single component of some broader flourishing of decentralized social networks. It’s making enough money just being Facebook.

But that impenetrable version of Facebook has become oppressive, raising real fears about monopoly power and a new push for regulation. We still don’t know how much those efforts will threaten Facebook, but they aren’t going away. So far, the biggest problem for reformers has been that we simply can’t imagine what a tamed Facebook would look like. Privacy and ad regulations seem like trimming around the edges, posing no real threat to the network itself. Fantasies of nationalization seem impractical. It’s hard to imagine either avenue making a meaningful dent in social media at large.

In his opening speech at F8, Mark Zuckerberg talked about how Facebook exists to connect people, a theme he’s returned to over and over through Facebook’s various crises. “I believe we need to design technology to help bring people closer together,” Zuckerberg said, giving the closest thing Facebook has to a mission statement. “And I believe that that’s not going to happen on its own.” But truly living up to that will mean stepping back from Facebook’s relentless drive toward platform lock-in. It’s time for Facebook to put its money where its mouth is.

via The Verge https://ift.tt/1jLudMg

May 5, 2018 at 05:07PM