I have a confession to make, a confession that I’m sure will border on sacrilege to a lot of people on the Internet.
I don’t really like Facebook, and the only reason why I have a Facebook account is because just about everyone I know has one.
I think I did like Facebook once, back when only a handful of people used it as a networking tool and before I felt like I had to check it twelve times a day. Having a Facebook account now just seems like a lot of work for very little reward. Ideally, I should log on once or twice a day and read interesting things that my friends have to say or learn the details of a party that I’m invited to. Instead, logging on means reading trite “inspirational” quotes, getting bombarded by invites to games I don’t want to play and seeing memes that stopped being funny weeks ago. It gets really irritating, yet everyone from my social circle to the mainstream media wants me to stay glued to my Facebook wall lest I become hopelessly out of touch with modern society.
Basically, Facebook has become more annoying than useful, but I think it’s actually following what I think is the lifespan of a typical social networking site. Before everyone on the planet had a Facebook account, just about everyone on the planet had a Myspace account. From a technical standpoint, I liked Myspace, and to be honest I thought it was better than Facebook is now. Myspace pages were more customizable than Facebook walls, there were message boards and chat rooms that let you easily talk to users that weren’t on your friends list, and it is still the preferred network for unsigned musicians. Of course, it started going downhill once people started to discover Facebook, but I don’t think it was out of any hatred for its interface. I think what happened was that Myspace became overcrowded with annoying users. The message boards and chat rooms were full of trolls, and it became way too easy to stumble into a really gaudy and poorly designed personal page. I would often see things like ditzy teenage girls who had way too many glitter effects on their pages and suburban white kids who had pictures of themselves flashing gang signs while loud gangsta rap plays. On top of it all, it seemed like everyone was using Myspace to bitch about other people or try to get laid by messaging random users.
Like the rest of the world, I eventually gave up on Myspace and moved on to Facebook. At the time, Facebook seemed like the more mature alternative to the drama-filled teen hangout that Myspace had become. College students and graduates used Facebook. They talked about their college courses. They talked about their careers. They talked about life, politics and society in a respectful manner. In other words, the Facebook crowd acted like adults. As someone who was tired of the constant trolling and high school drama on Myspace, I couldn’t sign up for a Facebook account fast enough.
Unfortunately, just as Myspace became too big and too crowded by stupidity, so has Facebook. Facebook’s interface usually keeps me from stumbling into pages that annoy me as much as some Myspace pages did, but between the sappy quotes, cutesy pictures, game requests and drama-filled status updates there’s plenty to keep me annoyed. Just as I got turned off of Myspace, I’m getting turned off of Facebook, something that I think was inevitable. It’s probably part of the social network life cycle. A shiny new networking site gets people’s attention, people flock to it and have a blast catching up with old friends for a few years, there’s an overload of annoying stupidity after a while, and people leave for the next big thing. Facebook may be the most visited site on the Internet now, and it will probably be going strong in a year or two, but if I’m right it will decline in popularity. People will move on to another social network, and Facebook will be the ghost town/punchline that Myspace has become.
So, if my theory about the rise and fall of social networks is correct, what will the next major social networking site be? Tumblr is already popular for blogging and photo sharing, and Google Plus (or Google+) has been trying really hard to become a Facebook killer. Maybe Myspace will have a renaissance and become king of the Internet again. It recently relaunched with an updated interface, and I would be willing to give it another chance if I knew enough people who were willing to do the same thing.
Until then, you could say that I’m suffering from social network burnout, or at least Facebook burnout. Feel free to continue updating your Facebook page and posting to your wall. If I’m not too annoyed, I might see it.
Then again, maybe I’ll be on Myspace. Hopefully I won’t be the only one.
(Just like my last "I hate Facebook" post, this will probably be shared on Facebook. I am well aware of the irony of that fact, so there's no need to remind me.)
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