Mark Cuban Calls Facebook a 'Time Waster'

Mark Cuban isn’t done criticizing Facebook. After saying last week the social network had “blown up” and alienated businesses by limiting their access to users’ news feeds, the Dallas Mavericks owner and tech entrepreneur is now calling Facebook a “time suck” that needs to learn its humble place in the media landscape.

Cuban posted the comments to his personal blog to clarify comments he made last week to ReadWrite on how Facebook aggressively filters posts from business pages to users’ news feeds. He wrote that Facebook is a “time waster” for people too anxious to “talk to the person next to you.” As such, Facebook should not bother filtering posts from business owners like Cuban:

FB doesn’t seem to want to accept that its best purpose in life is as a huge time suck platform that we use to keep up with friends, interests and stuff. I think that they are over-thinking what their network is all about .

Being a time suck that people enjoy is a good thing… [But] who really appreciates that some posts rise to the top of their newsfeed because some folks they used to work with and are still friends with shared a baby picture ? … In a perfect FB world every post enters the friends/like/subscriber’s timeline. If they log in and want to spend the time searching their timeline they see it, if not, not.

The Facebook news feed has been algorithmically favoring selected content, like the baby picture Cuban mentioned, since its launch in 2006. Facebook programmers are constantly tweaking the feed -- to please users, they say -- and in September began filtering page posts more aggressively after complaints about spam. This meant that business owners like Cuban tend to reach fewer users with each post and must buy “promoted post” advertising from Facebook if they want to reach even more.

Filling the role of “time suck” is actually a competitive job for properties like Facebook, which has made billions in profits replacing earlier time sucks like MySpace, Friendster, and AOL. Facebook itself faces competition from the likes of Twitter and Google, which is partly why it spends so much time trying to improve the relevance of its news feed.

It’s odd that Cuban, of all people, doesn’t appreciate the complexity involved in being a “time waster.” His NBA team the Mavericks spends inordinate time and money trying to be a compelling “time suck” for fans with nothing better to do than watch strangers play basketball for hours on end. The Mavericks hone elaborate on-court strategies, release and acquire highly skilled players, and strike complex broadcast and merchandizing arrangements. They don’t let just any random dribbler onto their home court to entertain the fans. Facebook works the same way.