Comment by Taikonerd
15 hours ago
In a weird way, I'm kind of glad that they're ruining facebook.com.
Like, even in its heyday, it was such an attention trap, and it had very negative effects on the people who got addicted (especially teens).
But the site has gotten so much worse in the past couple years, and its brand is in the garbage. Maybe that's all for the best -- it was never really worth preserving.
Thank God the teens have healthier outlets now like TikTok!
TikTok was actually pretty good before Larry the Lawnmower bought it.
Citation needed. TikTok has always been brainrot.
The issue is that small business still utilize them instead of paying for and maintaining a web site. Want to know our business ours, events, or when we close early ... facebook.
There needs to be an easy to use low-cost, possible also advertisement driven, alternative that business can latch to so more can leave facebook.
I actively refuse to support Meta and block all their domain names in case of clicking on a tiny URL that sends me to their site. It also helps block their analytics used by 3rd parties. I will forever be a sunk cost for them.
I mean, squarespace and similar services exist. Sure, there's a fee associated, but compared to even the costs of running a small coffee bar it's negligible. I could understand this argument in the 2000s and early 2010s; setting up a website meant engaging with a web consultant or similar IT agency, and there were yearly maintenance costs. It wasn't out of reach for most businesses, but it was expensive enough that a Facebook page was a genuine cost savings.
Anymore, putting up a basic template page for your business is maybe 2-3 hours if you're really non-technical. Sure, it will be just the basic template, but there's very little need for more customization than that. That hypothetical coffee bar really just needs a place to post hours, their menu, and maybe update with specials if they're ambitious. That's about all you get with a Facebook page anyway, there's zero customization.
I don’t really agree. All that’s happened is the shift of people onto newer platforms which didn’t need to evolve into disgusting highly-optimized addiction traps because they were specifically designed to be that from the start. Like TikTok or its identical copycats.
Yeah, that's a fair response. And most of what I don't like about Facebook can be summarized as, "they tried to turn it into TikTok."