Facebook groups are great. They bring together people with common interests, no matter how obscure, and are a fantastic way to share things with like-minded individuals, and if there isn't a group for your interest you can easily set one up. That's the theory anyway, but unfortunately there are a few problems with the way Facebook have decided to implement the group system that make it a rather less pleasant experience than it should be.
The principal issue is the way you can become part of a group. Not only can you decide to join a group yourself, but you can also be added by a friend without asking or being asked. This makes groups into an opt-out system where you have to make the effort to remove yourself from groups you have been added to but don't want to be part of, which seems backwards to me. In recent weeks, there has been something of an epidemic among myself and several friends of being added to large numbers of groups without being asked, so much of my time is spent removing myself from these groups just to keep my membership manageable. I'm getting very sick of this but under Facebook's current settings there is no way to prevent it happening.
What often seems to happen in my experience is that someone falls out with other members of an existing group and leaves to set up their own similar group to which they add all their friends. This inevitably results in half-a-dozen or more duplicate groups all covering the same subject and often with similar names, many of which have very little activity as there is simply no real demand for them. With the default option being to notify you of all activity within a group, your notifications can soon get overwhelmed with group activity that you don't really care about.
I have a core list of favourite groups that I look at regularly as they have a good-quality membership who frequently post interesting content, and a handful of others I dip into occasionally, but the rest just get forgotten as there are simply too many to manage; I have just checked my complete group list and it stands at over a hundred, which is far too many for one person to cope with. Facebook have recently introduced a new feature to the news feed to show groups you have been added to but not yet visited, which is an admission there is a problem but not in any way a solution.
So how can this problem be solved? Very simply really: instead of automatically making you a group member, the system should send you an invitation to join that you can choose to either accept or reject. Rather than the current "Your friend added you to this group", the notification should be "Your friend has invited you to join this group. Do you want to join?", which puts the decision to become a member solely on you and no else can add you without your consent. The invitation system is already implemented for liking pages so it should be easy to apply to groups as well, and as an extension of this, there should be an option to block all group invites if you're not interested in joining groups at all.
This is the major issue but there are a couple of others that also need fixing. The unavailable attachment issue I discussed months ago is still occurring and has not been changed in any way. In addition, it is possible for a user to block the admins of a group before joining, meaning the admins can't see their posts and surely defeating the purpose of admins having full control over the group. I can see no legitimate reason for doing this but it is a loophole that can easily be exploited to post spam that can't easily be removed, so why don't Facebook simply prevent users from joining groups they have blocked the admins of?
Yet again I reach the same conclusion: Facebook desperately needs to stop messing around changing things that its users are satisfied with and pay more attention to the simple problems that are spoiling the user experience and driving users away as a result.
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