Unsurprisingly, it fails to account for how normal human beings prefer to live their lives:
In 2008, I found myself speaking with the big boss himself, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. I was in the second year of my Ph.D. research on Facebook at Curtin University. And I had questions.
Why did Facebook make everyone be the same for all of their contacts? Was Facebook going to add features that would make managing this easier?
To my surprise, Zuckerberg told me that he had designed the site to be that way on purpose. And, he added, it was “lying” to behave differently in different social situations.
Up until this point, I had assumed Facebook’s socially awkward design was unintentional. It was simply the result of computer nerds designing for the rest of humanity, without realising it was not how people actually want to interact.
The realisation that Facebook’s context collapse was intentional not only changed the whole direction of my research but provides the key to understanding why Facebook may not be so great for your mental health.
The eventual collapse of Facebook is going to be positively epic. The entire operation is simply another attempt to fit the square peg of human behavior into the round hole of Mark Zuckerberg’s imaginary world.
The significance of this revelation, which is not exactly a surprise to those of us who have noticed Zuckerberg’s bizarre behavior, is that Facebook is going to make increasingly bad decisions based on its inherently false assumptions about people.