Hello Mark, Are You Aware of Facebook Flaws?

To: Mark Zuckerberg, Top boss of Facebook

From: Rakesh Raman, a social media activist

Mr. Mark,

I can see that after making bagfuls of money from Facebook, you are ignoring your own networking site like an abandoned child.

Now, your Facebook has become the world’s biggest time-waster for the hoi polloi while it’s a big piece of crap for the tech intelligentsia.

I have written you a few messages in the past explaining how Facebook has become a pain in the neck. You should read these messages again to fully understand the sorry state of affairs on your site. Here are the Message 1, Message 2 and Message 3.

Now, I want to inform you about some serious user experience (UX) flaws on Facebook with the hope that you will take some immediate corrective steps.

Here we go:

Insane Invites

When I enter Facebook, I see a flurry of forced invites to like useless pages, attend hopeless events, play perilous games and whatnot in the Notifications section and they keep coming throughout my stay on Facebook.

Why can’t you give me a blanket option to permanently block these invites so I could work peacefully on Facebook?

Jumping News Feed

Your News Feed section keeps jumping and jogging. Although there’s hardly a thing worth reading on Facebook, when I start reading something just to kill my time, the post automatically runs down, leaving me in a state of utter bewilderment.

Then it’s very difficult to chase that post and cull it out again from the running stream. Why can’t you keep it stable and let me scroll it up or down when I desire to do so?

Disliked Like

I know that the majority of Facebook users are illiterates who can perhaps read but can’t write even a single sentence correctly. This is evident from the fact that most just do copy-paste job by sharing pictures and posts scavenged from all across the web.

But the big trouble is with your Like button provided under each post. Your users’ foolishness comes to the fore when they press Like even for a post that mentions the demise or the illness of a family member. This is a major flaw of semantics.

To help such uneducated users, why can’t you provide iconic options in a drop-down list so they could choose and thus behave properly on Facebook?

Chat to Cheat

Now this is an open secret that you don’t have even a fraction of the number of users that you claim on Facebook. But to give credence to your false claims, you are trying to camouflage it by using the chat boxes on both sides of the News Feed area.

The vertical chat box on the right of the screen shows a dozen odd faces in the upper section and “MORE FRIENDS” in the lower section. I fail to understand the difference between these two types of friends. Similarly, the chat box on the left hand side shows 20 faces (some are even faceless) in a 5×4 matrix.

Although you prefer to keep it a secret, I presume the ones with a green bullet mark are available for chat and others are not, though their blank faces erroneously appear in the chat boxes.

If this is so, why are you creating confusion by showing two different chat boxes and why can’t you show only those who are available for chat? Isn’t it cheating, Mark?

Blocking Friends

On the one hand, you want to increase the number of users on Facebook by hook or by crook; on the other hand, you prevent users from expanding their network by blocking their friendship requests.

I know it clearly that a large number of friends in my network are those who never approached me for friendship and similarly I never sent them any request. But those are in my friends list because you fraudulently imposed them on me – like you have imposed many Facebook pages on me that I never liked.

If you honestly want your so-called social network to flourish, why don’t you allow people to send requests openly to others with similar interests? Let them accept or reject such requests. You have no business blocking them.

If I’m allowed to connect only with my family members and real-world friends (as you state), why do I need your artificial facility to do so? Try to understand this basic service of an online network, Mark.

Thoroughfare

Mark, if you really want to have decorum on Facebook, you must tame those who add me to their Facebook groups even without taking my consent. You must penalize those who forcefully make me fan of their Facebook pages that I never liked. After all, this is not supposed to be a thoroughfare.

We do not know if Facebook is part of this social media racket. But even if this wrong is being committed by external agencies who openly sell Facebook fans, they are using your property to commit this crime. So, you are responsible to check this wrongdoing. Aren’t you?

Games Addiction

You must realize Mark that Facebook games are like slow poison. People who are addicted to these games are slowly poisoning their minds and health. They also are spreading this venom by inviting others to play these games.

If you have even the slightest of concern for humanity, you must remove all games from Facebook. As a result, your user base will fall drastically because majority of your users are connected to Facebook only because of their addiction to games, but you must act and save an entire generation from this games-linked disaster.

Love Messages

I have been getting romantic messages everyday from different girls on Facebook. Something like this: “Hello Dear, I would like to get acquainted with you… “ These are so frequent that at this rate, by now I would have at least 189 girl friends from all parts of the world. That will perhaps be a world record.

However, I delete these messages thinking they are fake. But if they were real, I am making a big mistake of ignoring them and thus breaking the hearts of these beautiful females. What should I do, Mark? Please suggest.

If you study the above flaws deeply, you will realize Mark that Facebook is an utterly useless network mostly being exploited by brand agencies to hoodwink their clients by promising user engagement with the brands. But nothing useful is happening here because of the nature of users and Facebook’s shoddy user experience (UX) design.

If you want to make it a useful social network, then stop giving stepmotherly treatment to your own Facebook, Mark. That will be good for you and your dwindling user base. Do you agree?

By Rakesh Raman, the managing editor of RMN Company.

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