Snippet: Facebook Hates the Internet ☇

John Gruber:

You might think it’s hyperbole for Winer to say that Facebook is trying to kill the open web. But they are. I complain about Google AMP, but AMP is just a dangerous step toward a Google-owned walled garden — Facebook is designed from the ground up as an all-out attack on the open web. Marc Haynes’s Facebook post about Roger Moore is viewable by anyone, but:

It is not accessible to search engines. Search for “Marc Haynes Roger Moore” on any major search engine — DuckDuckGo, Google, Bing — and you will get hundreds of results. The story went viral, deservedly. But not only is the top result not Haynes’s original post on Facebook, his post doesn’t show up anywhere in the results because Facebook forbids search engines from indexing Facebook posts. Content that isn’t indexable by search engines is not part of the open web. (Even if I wanted to link to Haynes’s original post, how was I supposed to find it? I wound up with the original post URL via a Facebook-using friend who knows I prefer to link to original posts as a general rule.) The only way to find Facebook posts is through Facebook.

I’ve been moving away from Facebook little by little as time goes on and rarely get any sort of enjoyment out of browsing it (especially for the reasons John Moltz outlines), not to mention the creepiness factor of the service as a whole. Last week, I turned off the cross-posting from this site to the companion Facebook page, and I’ve come really close to just deleting my account. Their mobile apps are garbage and I always visit it from within a private browser window when I have to use it, to prevent the inevitable cross-tracking on other web sites. Tinfoil hat? Maybe, but why keep a service around that you don’t enjoy and doesn’t respect its users or the Internet as a whole?