How do we fix Facebook?

First, if you’re going to argue with me that Facebook is not broken, I’m not going to respond. If you like Facebook the way it is then by all means, enjoy it. Different strokes for different folks I suppose. For me though Facebook is broken. The feed seems to be filled with what can best be described as dreck (that’s a technical term, look it up).

I see:

• Political articles that I agree with because most of my friends have the same political views and the rare political article that I disagree with coming from the members of my family with different political views. None of these articles are meant to foster conversation by the way, they’re just flame bait to enrage the base.
• Quizzes about which Harry Potter character you are
• Videos of cats and other animals doing whatever it is that cats and other animals do
• The occasional picture of my friends doing something
• Ads

And this to me is where Facebook is really going wrong. Sure, helping Russian bots undermine our election is bad but it’s a symptom, not the cause. It wouldn’t have had the influence it had without the feed already being a mess of inflammatory drivel.

So do we all delete our social profiles and go back to sharing pictures through email? I think that might be an overreaction. The product manager in me thinks that Facebook is a great product that can be fixed and doesn’t need to be tossed away. The question is how.

All good projects begin with problem definition

First, let’s define the problem. The feed right now has too much bad content. It does have some good content like those pictures I mentioned, but too much of my feed is taken up by what could be be referred to as crap. To refine this definition of crap a bit better, I would say that right now too much of Facebook is friends talking AT me as opposed to friends talking WITH me. Folks are sharing because they crave attention and not because they have something valuable to share. To put it more succinctly:

The feed had too much low value posts. This is driven by people’s need for attention, which is satisfied by those low value posts.

For example, everyones loves seeing those red notification icons, they’re like a bell to one of Pavlov’s dogs. I can get a few of those notifications by posting a well thought out political discourse or I can get a lot of those notifications by posting a caricature of Donald Trump humping a lamp post. One is high effort / low gratification and the other is low effort / high gratification. Which one do you think I’ll choose? Yah, exactly.

Next, define the hypothesis

People will post less low quality content if we:

a. Reduce the reward for posting low quality content

b. Increase the effort to posting low quality content

Does anyone like the like?

First, we have to think big. This isn’t going to be fixed by some minor algorithm tweaks. Instead, we have to look at the very core of what makes Facebook the dreck machine it is, the like.

Originally, the like was a simple thumbs up that was used to indicate whether or not I liked something. In theory, it still is but the reality is that this is a low effort way of marking agreement with what I just read. The various other emotion responses offer variations on a theme but at its most basic, a like is a way for me to provide an endorphin rush for the author of the post by saying “yah, good job, you’ve earned my attention!”

It’s also horribly corrupted by the way that various organizations use it. Here I’m referring to the nonstop “like our picture if you agree that cancer is a bad thing” posts. Yah, cancer is definitely a bad thing, but liking your picture is just a way for you to get access to my information and also to sign me up to see more of your updates in my feed.

So step #1 in fixing Facebook, eliminate the like (and all the other versions of a like with a different smiley face).

Whoa whoa whoa, did I just suggest eliminate the like? Absolutely. What will we lose? What does you liking my post give me? Nothing is the correct answer. If you want to interact with me then interact with me, leave a comment or message me directly. That’s valuable social interaction. A like is not.

But wait, how will I let brands on Facebook know that I really want to follow their stuff? Well, I guess my first question is why would you want to do this but I’m going to assume you have a reason. So fine, if you want to subscribe to a brand’s page let’s actually create a subscribe button. That’s a much more honest way for Facebook users to say “I want to see more updates from this brand.” Don’t like the word subscribe? Facebook already offers a Follow option so we can use that one.

And just think of what we will gain. How many less inflammatory click bait will we see when the main reason for posting it is gone? Sure, some folks will continue to post this nonsense but deprived of their like based endorphin rush, I predict a dramatic decline in poor quality posts.

Creating the anti Twitter

Second, let’s create a minimum text requirement when sharing links. You want to share a link about politics? Wonderful, but you have to write at least 240 characters of text. If you can’t write 50 words about a topic then I guess it’s not that important to you. Again, seems harsh but this will force users to stop spamming low quality content. How many users will actually publish the results of “which breed of cat are you?” When they have to write 240 characters about this quiz? Answer, none.

Remember the problem definition

Now some of you are thinking “whoa Gal, are you sure? These seem like pretty dramatic changes and I think Facebook will lose a lot of content if you implement them.” Yes, you’re right, and that’s exactly the point. Remember our problem definition above. Facebook isn’t facing a content shortage, they’re facing a content quality issue. They have too much content and most of it is crap.

Implement these two changes and the entire game changes. The feed loses all the horrible things that make me not want to log into Facebook and we can all go back to sharing pictures of our burritos. Because at the end of the day, sharing burrito pictures was fun. Facebook used to be fun and I want it to be fun again.