Everyone has a Facebook, but does anyone actually like it?
There is a recent movement to leave Facebook called #DeleteFacebook, spurred on by news of a political data firm gaining access to the private data of 50 million users. Notable people like Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, have jumped on board.
Before deleting Facebook, I think it’s good to ask yourself why you use it.
People often use Facebook because everyone else uses it. Facebook has become more a commodity than a platform people genuinely enjoy. It makes sense why so many people use it. Facebook does everything: Messaging, voice and video calls, contacts, team communication, live streaming, buying and selling stuff and a live calendar for events.
Facebook can be more useful than novel. It isn’t particularly fun or exciting anymore, but it makes life easier by providing a platform for connections. Adding someone on Facebook is a low-risk way of connecting with someone. You can always block them later if you don’t like them.
Andrew Brand | Argonaut
Other than the more practical uses of Facebook, it also provides a platform for endlessly scrolling. We get a nice feed full of random content, weird videos, memes and politically charged posts. Entertainment is always present. We also get a nice amount of advertisements directly targeted to us, made possible by all the data we freely provide to Facebook and their partners.
Another function of Facebook is a record book of your life. It carries photos, comments and memories forever. Facebook has been around for more than 10 years, so we rely on Facebook to store our memories. But at any point Facebook could shut down and all your data would be lost.
But we still use Facebook because it’s convenient. It’s a place for acquaintances and random people to stay connected with each other without sharing direct information.
Facebook tries to do everything. It’s the ultimate all-purpose app. But this also makes it a cluttered app. Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat are all more streamlined than Facebook, but Facebook has more users than all of them combined — 2.2 billion, to be exact. Almost a third of the world’s population uses Facebook.
Everything Facebook offers is available elsewhere. There is nothing inherently unique about Facebook anymore.
Some people who #DeleteFacebook will be moving to Vero — an Instagram clone that promises to offer an enhanced, ad-free experience. The problem with Vero is they only have 3 million users compared to Instagram’s 800 million.
The one thing that makes social media apps thrive is their user base. With a limited number of users there’s limited appeal for new people to join.
I think Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat acquired such large user bases because they were all novel and ideas at first. Everyone wanted to join because they hadn’t seen it before. Now it’s difficult to make a new social media app that isn’t a clone of the existing ones, which offers people little reason to leave the current apps they use.
It’s important to know why you do something. I’m not suggesting you go delete Facebook — I’m not suggesting you keep it either. But, it is important why we individually utilize Facebook.Maybe there will be a new ultimate all-purpose app to replace Facebook in the future, but for now, we’re stuck with Facebook because it’s popular. But we determine whether we participate or not. And we determine how and why we participate, or why we choose to #DeleteFacebook.
Andrew Brand can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @theandrewbrand