How to ditch Facebook without ditching your friends

A new interop design fiction from EFF.

Facebook users claim to hate the service, but they keep using it, leading many to describe Facebook as “addictive.” But there’s a simpler explanation: people keep using Facebook though they hate it because they don’t want to lose their connections to the people they love.

Calling Facebook “addictive” plays into the company’s own mythology, the sales-pitch they make to advertisers, in which they claim to be neuro-sorcerers whose mastery of “big data” and “dopamine loops” can sell anything to anyone, which is why you should buy ads on their service.

The simpler explanation — that Facebook is holding the people you love hostage, and you’ll put up with a bad situation in order to stay connected to them — has many advantages over the “evil sorcerer” hypothesis. For starters, it doesn’t require that you accept Facebook’s own self-serving and improbable claims about having invented a mind-control ray. Instead, the “hostage-taking” explanation rests on a visible, easily verified fact: if you leave Facebook, the service won’t let you send messages to the people who stay behind.

Economists have a name for this: “switching costs,” this being everything you have to give up when you switch from one service to another. Internally…