After an hour of traffic, I stopped in at the local Dunkin Donuts for something to eat. The nice person took my order, but didn’t ask the question, “Do you want your bagel toasted?”
Not a big deal, but I generally don’t like toasted bagels unless the bagel has been frozen. Of course, they toasted it and I was too tired to fight it.
It is hard to fight the default behavior. Most people like toasted bagels. The person behind the counter, faced with a rapidly growing line is looking for ways to speed things up, so he skips a step or two. It is only a bagel.
Imagine if you were Facebook working with 400+ million active users and you noticed that most people never took advantage of all of the options that you have painstakingly engineered into the service. The line grows longer and the options get more complicated. So in an effort to speed through the line, you streamline by taking advantage of the default behaviors.
Just another part of Facebook’s slippery slope.