First, the events of today left a new Republican Senator with the vote capable of either allowing or preventing Obama's health care bill from passing. (This means it will almost definitely fail.)
Second, and on a more trivial level, I realized that Facebook sucks.
It occurred to me as I listened to my friends argue over the fate of health care in America (ironically on Facebook), my basic understanding of the reason behind the failure of this bill was that it had become too convoluted with earmarks by being tossed around Congress for too long and turned into such a monstrously large, confusing, and complicated bill that it was more and more doomed as the clock ticked away.
Honestly, I don't know anything about health care reform. Obama's proposal came during the summer when I was away from any news outlet that would have enabled me to understand this complex issue. I'll leave my political/ideological opinions out of this, because anyone who wishes to argue against me could probably 1-up me with legitimate statistics. The point is that with each time that the Democrats scaled back the bill to gain support from Republicans, influential conservative talking heads (that's you, anyone-on-fox-news) managed to alienate a huge amount of people to the idea of reform, and the whole situation turned into chaos regarding who to appease to in order to gain support.
Enough of that, it hurts my brain.
On the other hand, I have actually been a huge fan of Facebook since I was able to join (around the time they opened access to high school students). I was apparently one of the few people who supported the famed layout change of 2008, which I don't think anyone is complaining about now. I joined MySpace around the same time (early 2007) so that I could decide which one I preferred using, and MySpace was gone within probably four months. Obviously I made the right choice for the time, but now I think Facebook is destined to face a similar fate to MySpace, maybe within three years.
Facebook has gone to shit recently, for many reasons. I'll sum them up as briefly as possible.
- Chat doesn't ever work.
- The notification window goes off the screen when you get many in rapid succession
- Very few applications work properly, and many are actually phishing applications disguised as "wall posts" and such that can hack your accounts.
- Groups have mostly deteriorated into "freebie" groups, which are also spam.
- The groups that aren't freebie groups are almost completely plastered with spam and trolls.
- Notes, while occasionally interesting, are largely stupid quizzes that people stole from MySpace in order to talk about themselves.
- Worst of all... fan pages. They aren't even legitimate entities or funny things anymore. They are random thoughts that everybody has thought at some point, and everybody joins about 15 of these ever fucking second. It completely covers my news feed, and I can't filter these posts out of my feed at all. It's so fucked up.
So what's the point of mentioning this? In an attempt to attract more users with its shiny bells and whistles, Facebook added an assload of new features while failing to realize that it had made social networking much more difficult, which is the point of the website itself. Where have we seen this before? MySpace? Definitely. Allowing users to add their own HTML to customize their profile resulted in a very shitty-looking website. Then, it turned into a breeding ground for whiny teens and pedophiles, a ton of spam, and eventually the very same application platform that is currently killing Facebook. As it grew more and more convoluted in an attempt to mirror the then-simpler design of Facebook, it began to lose users to the very website it was trying to imitate. I'm actually guilty of being one of those users; I chose Facebook over MySpace because Facebook was simpler. The reason I was such a big fan of the big layout change of 2008 was because users were making the site a wreck with the relentless addition of their applications, much in the same way that HTML ruined the MySpace experience, and I believed that this would rectify the situation. It did, to some extent, but other problems arose with further layout changes and features, and now I've lost my support for Facebook.
Before writing this, I began to realize a trend that was consistent through both politics and social networking: as something grows more and more complex, it loses potential to succeed. Another example would be the evolution of bacteria. Briefly put, our antibiotics and disinfectants and antiseptics have become so good at killing bacteria that bacteria have evolved to become more and more resistant to them. Is all hope for preventing the spread of bacterial disease futile in the end?
It seems that the only way to ensure that anything survives in this world is to make sure that it remains simple. For example, Google has maintained its simple format for several years, and has become a staple of the internet experience. But how can we save ourselves from new political, natural, and economic threats if we stay the same? We can't. We have to be able to adapt to our environment. Facebook adapted to the demands of its users, but in the process created a monster. Congress adapted as much as possible to the economic desires and ideological wants of its members, but even with a reasonable method of lowering health insurance costs, the bill was doomed to failure. The real question is: How far must we go to adapt to the world?
In neither situation was the end result very different from the thing it was trying to improve upon. Facebook became more like MySpace, and the proposed health care bill was, as I interpret it, compromised to the point where it would not have changed much in the current system. In a weird, sort of ironic way, our overly feverish attempts to correct the flaws of something that is broken doesn't appear to fix anything. My belief is that they have been mulled over for so long that the people in charge of fixing the problems forget what they're trying to fix.
Sorry, I realize that this thought was really long and boring. But it was important that I record it because I think this will be something that I need to remember in my future career, whatever it may be - even the people in charge of the most powerful country in the world tend to forget to keep track of what they're trying to do.
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