What we never talk about: Facebook has a product problem

Turns out Facebook’s product is pretty bad.

Facebook has two major problems, but you only hear about one of them. When Facebook is in the news, it’s for bad privacy practices and (lack of) moderation policies. Recent Medium posts similarly discuss issues with medical data and deepfake policies. Collectively, these stories tell us that Facebook’s upper ranks are unable or unwilling to make tough policy decisions.

But this poor decision-making is compounded by Facebook’s second, less obvious problem: Facebook’s core product just isn’t very good. When we shifted our attention to privacy and disinformation, we stopped noticing that Facebook’s actual service is plagued by poor design and bugs. For all of Facebook’s inattention to fake news and disinformation, it has paid even less attention to the actual functionality and interface that its two billion users interact with each month.

Facebook’s core product just isn’t very good.

Rather than recognizing this problem, Facebook has instead talked big game about how it will make time spent on the service more meaningful. It’s tweaked the News Feed algorithm to “better connect you with the posts you care about” and started emphasizing (and making cringe commercials about) Facebook groups. But Facebook hasn’t announced any product changes to enable this meaningful interaction beyond small algorithm changes.

If Facebook is going to be a place for meaningful interactions, you would expect the product’s features to facilitate that. Instead, logging onto Facebook is like stepping into a funhouse of poor design and engineering experiences.

Don’t believe me? Let’s consider some examples:

Problem 1: sharing photos is hard

Facebook desperately wants you to share photos. Ten years ago, Facebook bragged that Facebook was the “biggest photo sharing website” and explained how the service stored and indexed those photos. Since then, Facebook has continued emphasizing photo sharing, even modifying the News Feed algorithm so that if you interact with photos more than text, eventually your Feed will only contain photos.