Once upon a time, there was an innovative idea came up. When most people could not imagine why would they share tiny trivial matters in daily life, someone invented the Like & Share, which changed our lives in the past decade.

Reunion with old friends, have many people saying Happy Birthday to you, or getting lots of Likes by posting...etc were all innovative features at "THAT" period of time. But now, how many of these do you still care?

Business page and celebrity page were also a breakthrough. Who didn't felt good directly talk to CEO of a business (usually about a complaint) or getting your idol replied you with a thanks for the support.

Old days are gone. I personally still use facebook only about once or twice a week mostly due to a yet-to-break habitual action. The reasons for leaving (or staying) may be different among people. I may also be biased too. Let's collect some facts then...

Why am I see this?

Advertisement, or more exactly the revenue, is an unavoidable objective for any company. As seen on TV, the commercial can be as long as a few minutes time. It has not been a big problem. Instead, this could be a toilet or getting some snacks kind of break as we all get used to. So why do we hate ad on social media?

In my case, it is a problem of expectation. For TV, we all know there is a commercial in between the programme. But in social media, we were told that is a place for meeting friends. Furthermore, it is particularly frustrating if you digging into more details of the ad settings.

On any sponsor ad, click on the top right button. You will see a pop up about "Why am I seeing this?". Following through the wizard, you may find your destiny defined by facebook. i.e. your ad preference.

Huh... the need-not-to-say ad preference is no ad for sure! There is certainly not such an option, but a detailed breakdown of what kind of ad you like to see. It is probably a showcase to their advertising customers how precise can they reach people, but it is also a total nonsense for general users.

Friend requests, people you may know

Whenever there is a platform, there will be some people abusing the platform. Hackers and advertisers making friend requests are commonly seen. Since we may just simply ignore, therefore I do not see the feature of friend request as a big problem.

However, I really doubt the feature of people you may know. If you ever try to take a glance at the list, it is not difficult to find someone you really know but not yet a friend on facebook. How come facebook knows who I may know? May it be a friend of friends on facebook? May it due to the GPS location tracking of my whereabouts? May it be my phone number appears on someone contact list?

It is technically possible to monitor your everything online for their monetization. For example, if any text in your private conversation that matches their list of keywords, an ad could be pop up later.

Our privacy is being monetized without our consent.

How about the whale on facebook

Big business page owners, early adopters and a more recent term, key opinion leaders used to be influential "few years ago". Their hard earned (or expensively purchased) Likes did give a high percentage of organic reach to their followers. The cost of content exposure at facebook was usually compared against other media as a strong selling point at that time.

The entry barrier for building a facebook page is none! More and more people therefore rushed to build their page. After a few years when you find everyone is a media and everyone is an expert, would the content still be worth reading? There are more content than space in your newsfeed. The way to reach is to produce even more content by the page owners. The situation would just getting worse as times goes by.

Like it or not, facebook made a change in the algorithm to avoid such content from being shown in your newsfeed. For a page with hundred thousands of followers, the organic (free) reach could be less than a few percent of its fan base. The only way to get reach is by "Boosting" your post.

The more people boosting, the more unwanted content shown. Therefore the process re-iterate again at a higher cost of boosting. This cycle happen again and again. At the end of the day, there is only one winner. But it is definitely an unsustainable one.

Would steemit be a new utopia or just another facebook? Time will tell!