Everybody wants to be spoonfed information now
Free Facebook sucks. What started as an initiative to allow people to be able to talk and connect to each other even without an active data connection has now transformed into the refuge of the lazy.
For people who don’t know, both telcos in the Philippines allow users to enjoy free Facebook access, albeit with limitations. You can still see your newsfeed and the status updates of friends and family, but you can’t see any photos that they upload. On that same vein, you can also see page stories and links to articles, but you can’t read them at all since this requires that you have an active data connection.
It’s become common practice now for people on free Facebook to ask for an article from a website to be copied and pasted on the comments section so they can read it. That’s problematic, for a few reasons: one, it denies the website (in our case, Unbox) the traffic that would be generated by people going to the actual link, and steals views away from the content provider since other people can now see the story in its entirety. Most websites aren’t charity cases – we provide you content that you want, while you give us something for all the trouble we go into to give you guys that content. Only fair, right?
Free Facebook is also probably one of the biggest contributors to fake news and fake news sites propagating. Since people on free Facebook can only see the title plus the short blurb on the bottom, they share it to their feed since they don’t have the means to check if the story is true or not.
That’s not the only thing I hate with free Facebook. The biggest gripe I have with it is that it empowers laziness, especially in Facebook groups that have replaced traditional internet forums. Here’s the rub: virtually everybody can join and post in Facebook forums now, but not everybody can Google an answer to a particular question. So instead of someone taking the time to see what phones have Super AMOLED displays, for example, many people just ask it in the Facebook group of their choice.
And honestly it empowers laziness. Gone are the days when people open Google first and try to do research there before asking people a question. Many people now when they join a group page don’t bother to read the rules or even search the group if their questions have already been answered – many expect to be spoonfed information that’s either been presented earlier, or can easily been searched and answered via Google. It’s the type of thing I’ve been seeing a lot on many of the groups that I manage, across all interests, from gadgets, to toys to airsoft – people are either too lazy or unwilling to put in the work or the load to Google answers to things. It’s absolutely unfathomable to me how, in an age where information is quite literally in the palms of everybody’s hands, people have become too lazy to find things out for themselves.
