| > 5) Built-in messaging allows you an easier way to communicate meeting details privately without having to give your phone number or email address. Your notion of "private" is a little strange. Facebook offers the illusion of private transactions by effectively robbing everyone of their privacy - in other words, that is how they established themselves as the pre-eminent and now possibly only two sided marketplace for the "common folks". This is like thanking the local thugs for keeping peace in the streets so that people can go about their local commerce in a peaceful way. Contrast this to all the other things we actually consider private: face to face meetings, phone conversations (ok, not so much anymore), sending physical letters (again...), etc. where there is, or used to be, a somewhat reasonable expectation that the conduit facilitating your private interaction was not gathering all that information to be packaged off to the highest bidder. Also, just wait until one day your customer realizes he/she is being targeted with ads based on stuff they bought from you and from someone else, which when combined exposes them in some way they would rather not have been. You just might wish you were merely dealing with the "spammers and scammers" instead, in which case there is usually at least the possibility of recourse. Yes, all my criticisms can be directed at internet commerce in general. It is only FB which has had a history of leaving a lot of things unsaid in a way which makes their users feel like idiots once people realize exactly why those things were left unsaid. For e.g., I bet no one actually asked FB if they are going to show ads on WhatsApp, instead choosing to believe and then applaud the WhatsApp founders for their stance on ads. On hindsight, people are now realizing that MZ never actually gave a shit what the WhatsApp founder said or did, and was only too happy to let everyone make complete fools of themselves. I can pull out a story here which would tell people exactly what MZ thinks of his users in general, but unfortunately I am starting to now think that MZ was spot-on with his assessment. |
I think the OP does a good job of outlining why this is preferable to Craigslist for your run of the mill buying and selling, namely that buying from a known entity is generally preferable than buying from an unknown one.
Facebook makes a set of tradeoffs regarding privacy and monetization, and they seem to be very popular. You assign a lot of agency to Facebook for orchestrating all of this, when really they are just providing to what the market wants: a free (as in beer) social network.
/counter-rant