If you follow me on a somewhat regular basis, you’ll know I recently downloaded a browser extension called ‘Fluff Busting Purity’, or FB Purity. The goal of FB Purity is to allow people to fully customize their Facebook experience. You have the opportunity to remove game requests, shared stories, linked articles, and more. You can change the layout, the font, you can modify a lot about the whole look. It really does improve Facebook, especially if you use it on a regular basis to keep up with friends and family. The question is, why is this extension necessary? Why have the changes Facebook made over the last few years degraded the user experience?

Facebook is free to use. There’s no fee to use it, and the likelihood of the site charging money is non-existent. At the same time, Facebook is worth money. Quite a bit of money in fact. It’s worth over three hundred billion dollars. The money that Facebook generates isn’t from the users of the site, but rather the advertisers selling ads. Much like Google, Facebook doesn’t sell products, it sells ad space. Like the newspapers of yesterday, Facebook’s main goal, as a business, is to sell ads. Unlike newspapers though, content isn’t provided by a team of journalists or reporters. It’s provided by the users.

This is one of the problems with Facebook. The reason many creative people, musicians, artists, comedians, and movie makers, have beef with Facebook is the method in which allow you to share content. Facebook boasts over eight million video views a day. In the first quarter of 2015, 725 of the top 1000 videos on Facebook were stolen from Youtube. If the video is viewed on Youtube, the creator of the video gets reimbursed with cash. If the video gets played through the Facebook player, the creator gets squat. Now, this is obviously an issue, because the people who make the content will have less of an incentive to create more content. And it’s incredibly easy to steal content or ideas, just like I did. all the information I pulled was from this video.

Luckily enough, even if you watch this video from my site, the person who made it still gets a view.

With FB Purity, I get the option to turn off all of Facebook’s videos, but it still allows me to view Youtube videos that have been posted to Facebook. I get to still watch videos from Facebook, as long as they give the original Youtube link. There’s also the option to turn off the autoplay that is normally turned on when you go to Facebook. Most of the changes made to Facebook are to link you directly with advertisers.

I’ve read numerous posts in regards to the changes Facebook keeps making to their site, and most of them are negative. Facebook makes it difficult to stop the inflow of garbage to your feed. You have to reject every specific application or game request, it seems. FB Purity solves a lot of the issues that have appeared in recent years, allowing you to flat out purge a number of items that are clogging up your Facebook page.

Facebook claimed that FB Purity violates it’s terms of service, and they’re probably right. At the same time, FB Purity still has a Facebook fan page, here https://www.facebook.com/fluffbustingpurity. It won’t harm your computer in any way, and Facebook isn’t going to come after you if you install it. If you’re one of the many that have become dissatisfied with Facebook recently, then you will at least want to check it out.

Even though Facebook continues to grow, and currently has over a billion subscribers, most the people signing up for Facebook happen to be over thirty. Facebook has a hard time attracting young people to it’s service, as their parents tend to have the service as well. Teenagers are much more interested in sites like Instagram for their social media needs. Facebook is seen as a place where old people hang out.

Will Facebook be around forever? I’m not sure, but I’d place my money on it going the way of the Dodo. Social media has been around for only a short amount of time, and before Facebook there was Myspace. Google has cemented itself in the age of information by creating an extremely powerful search algorithm, one that has changed the way our information is connected. Facebook… allows us to connect to each other in a manner that’s more efficient than phone calls and emails? Facebook needs to reinvent itself to become cool again, because the last demographic in the tech world you want to attract are the old fogies. What Facebook desperately needs is a Facelift.

Sincerely,

The Illustrious Mr. Charlton

p.s. I’m not saying that Youtube is devoid of content theft, they have their own unique problems.