What Facebook does worst: care about people
There is something fundamentally broken in Facebook's management.
Underlying all of Facebook’s screw-ups is a bumbling obliviousness to real humans. The company’s singular focus on “connecting people” has allowed it to conquer the world, making possible the creation of a vast network of human relationships, a source of insights and eyeballs that makes advertisers and investors drool.
But the imperative to “connect people” lacks the one ingredient essential for being a good citizen: Treating individual human beings as sacrosanct. To Facebook, the world is not made up of individuals, but of connections between them. The billions of Facebook accounts belong not to “people” but to “users,” collections of data points connected to other collections of data points on a vast Social Network, to be targeted and monetized by computer programs.
There are many of us at Vanilla who have had enough experiences on forums over the years, for better and worse, to know better than this. And that experience is crucial in keeping us on an even keel.
Facebook seems to be blind to the possibility that it could be used for ill. In Zuckerberg’s recent interview with Recode’s Kara Swisher, she mentions meeting with product managers for Facebook Live. They seemed “genuinely surprised,” she said, when she suggested that it might be used to broadcast murder, bullying, and suicide. “They seemed less oriented to that than towards the positivity of what could happen on the platform,” she says.
Twitter is every bit as bad, in my view. The terrible things that happens on there, and their insanely bad response to it, is beyond belief at times.
This is why communities cannot be managed by Fortune 100 CEOs. There must be a locus of control invested in the communities' actual success (not secondary metrics like registered users or total posts) to prevent this sort of disconnect.
I often talk about customers being "5 steps down a rabbit hole" and we need to fish them out to get them to talk about their "real" goals that aren't arbitrary metrics. It's important for communication, it's important for customer retention, but it's also important to keep things real.
A community fills up with real people, and everyone needs to care about what happens to them.