A few years ago, Facebook was a site that helped us keep up to date with our friends. We got something to stay in touch, and it made millions off the personals to the side. Suddenly, that’s not good enough.
Now Facebook is a place for us to find out what games we need to buy, what movies we need to buy, what newspapers, clothes and sodas we need to buy. I have to dig through pages of “status ads” just to find something typed by an actual person. This thing isn’t even the thing it’s supposed to be anymore.
It’s hard for me to write this without sounding like one of those guys. But honestly, after all the stuff my family and I went through this week, I’m officially in full-on rant mode so you might as well pull up a chair. This whole “ad” nonsense is just getting ridiculous. It’s turned a social networking experience into a really messed up Yellow Pages, only instead of seeing ads next to the phone numbers you see ads next to more ads. I almost wanted to call this post How One Company Tricked 900 Million People Into Working for Free.
Everytime someone gets an animal on a farm or something equally stupid :P it becomes a status. That status is then seen by their 1,000 or so friends, which turns into clicks, which turns into ad revenue and profits. This happens hundreds of thousands of times a day. The products make money, Facebook makes money, everyone else involved makes money but the people doing the dirty work bombing their friend’s news feeds with obtrusive ads get nothing. See before, they were making money off the stuff you found interesting. Now, they’re making money off you.
I guess I’m just really tired of watching companies cop out and low ball people. Kids are going to grow up thinking the only way they can be successful is by ripping everyone off, and that’s not true. Yet its all I see happening – I’ve witnessed my favorite thing in the world become the greediest industry in existence, every other day I’m told what else my cell provider’s taking away. But I’ve never seen a product go completely missing like this before. It hit me like a brick wall, and felt like I logged into MySpace by accident. The last time I checked, I had 24 friends on here. Because this profile was just for the people close to me. Look at this picture: http://i50.tinypic.com/2u4u4us.png. Only 24 people, and nothing but ads. I pity those who have a hundred plus, let alone that friend everybody. And these guys are far from the only ones using shady business practices, too. I did a documentary on Xbox Live once. It has the same online performance as it’s rivals, doesn’t use servers for the majority of it’s games, it’s menus are bloated with ads while the other platforms have none and it’s run by the richest company out of all of them yet is the only service that costs a monthly fee to use. My Mom was running out of minutes and messages the other day, so just for the hell of it, I figured out how many texts she’d have if she used her data plan instead. A text takes up around a kilobyte of data, meaning she would have about 4,194,304 messages to send but they’ll charge us ten bucks for a thousand of them. If it sounds like I’m over here flipping tables, I’m not. I just know when something’s wrong.
Seeing Facebook this morning was a wake up call.
The biggest thing that amazes me is how people perceive this stuff. Somebody explains one tiny aspect of how something works on the inside and all of a sudden we’re internet professors who collectively agree with it. A while back publishers claimed that used games were “killing devs” and said a ton of money is lost because of them, so codes were introduced which you need to buy in order to play with other people. The reality is they were only losing an opportunity to make more money, but because they masked it with a sliver of logic by saying it would help the devs now every gamer on earth miraculously knew everything and agreed this was the smartest move forward. Completely ignoring the fact that these online passes do nothing outside of giving publishers an even bigger excuse to churn out mediocre shovelware, how many of the devs we supported by buying these online passes didn’t get laid off after that game’s release? We’ll adopt a business strategy that allows us to continue making garbage products while simultaneously charging more for them as opposed to creating something worthwhile that doesn’t end up back on the shelves in the first place but don’t worry, online passes are totally awesome cause some guy told me so once. Support the devs!
When you sit back and look at the bigger picture, it’s heartbreaking to see what the world has become. You cant help but wonder what the future holds, if we truly lost the values to care whether or not we’re being used. It’s tough to understand why anyone would let these things slide… do people really think this is what they have to do to stay in business? That Zuckerberg would be in the poor house and Facebook would vanish if he took home 40 million a year instead of 80? Does nobody care that a site which already distances people from each other whose sole purpose was to keep us in contact now makes it almost impossible to stay posted? No one ever asks if these companies are being greedy, and using sleazy tactics to squeeze blood from a stone. Well… that is what they’re doing. Instead of selling a product, making a profit, then creating a better product, they’re selling cheap products that sell you other products. I already left Facebook in August, but would come back once a month because I couldn’t speak with you guys anywhere else. I wanted to make sure everyone was ok. My final straw was logging in today and having to scroll through four pages worth of Farmville and Spotify just to see something written by a human being.
There was a reason I brought up the consoles before; It makes for a good example of why this site is terrible now. The Playstation gives people an almost indistinguishable multiplayer – but for free and without ads – all from a company with less money than the one that does charge you. Well in that same respect, Google+ is run by a business that was founded off ad revenue and yet there’s not a single one in sight. I can’t ignore that, it’s hard for me to not recognize when somebody does the right thing no matter how much I disagree with them. I’ll always give credit where credit’s due, but the way people perceive things with this “one piece of information is enough” mentality forces me to make it painfully clear that I kiss no company’s ass, and it would be incredibly naive of someone to read what I’ve said here and assume that I think these people can do no wrong. That job is reserved for the iSheep. I’m aware of the fact that a business doing one thing right does not give them a get out of jail free card.
I think the bottom line is no one questions anything anymore. If I wanted to be like everyone else, I wouldn’t try to change things for the better. I’d just say “dude that sucks” and do nothing instead. But that’s not me, I’m not like most people and I don’t think you guys are either. I feel like I study this rare and ancient art of speaking with my wallet, because even though say $30 doesn’t seem like a lot, every $30 I don’t give these companies is a trip to the doctors office and it’s only a matter of time before they bleed. I have four Xboxes but no Xbox Live. Sure I can afford it. I don’t agree with it. I won’t morally support something I think is wrong, especially if I believe it takes advantage of people. Sometimes the fights you have in life aren’t always for yourself, they’re for those around you. The ones you care about, the people who are affected. Sometimes you just have to do what’s right, and no good businessman in the world needs to milk something in order to stay relevant. That’s a sign you’re doing it wrong.
Thank you for letting me get this off my chest. A long time ago a good friend of mine said if you want to change the world you have to lead by example, and that’s exactly what I’m going to do. I’ll still be on my phone incase someone needs me, but I’m not going to post here anymore. If you want to keep up with me, add me on Google+ or follow me on Twitter. I’ve got a nice artwork album going over there. :)
Google+: http://goo.gl/nniCu
Twitter: http://twitter.com/TerryxMasters
Formspring: http://formspring.me/TerryMasters