When I’m on Facebook, I love to consume Facebook video. The experience is fantastic: they autoplay, they’re all in-app, they’re perfectly smooth, they’re easily snackable, etc. It’s pretty much the best shortform video discovery mechanism on the internet, and Facebook’s algos are serving me up a lot of video now, almost to the exclusion of everything else. 

But here’s what’s hateful about them: as someone who loves to share things I find online, Facebook videos are the worst. Literally, the absolute worst form of content on the internet. There’s a video I’d love to email to my sister. Can I do that? No. There’s a video I’d love to tweet out to my followers. Can I do that? No. Take every single form of communication that we use these days, from email and Twitter to Instagram and iMessage and WhatsApp and Skype and everything else – yes, even the services which are owned by Facebook. None of them, not one, can be used for sharing Facebook videos. (I’m not sure about Facebook Messenger, because I refuse to download it on principle.) 

The only way to share a Facebook video, unless you’re a super ninja when it comes to embed codes, is to share it on a Facebook page, nearly always your own. But I don’t want to share videos with all my Facebook friends, that’s not how I use Facebook. And so Facebook video is a constant exercise in frustration, where I can share the way I don’t want to, and I can’t share the way I do want to. I can narrowly see how this might be good for the FB ecosystem, but it’s surely really bad for the FB brand as a whole.