In the meandering, ever-changing saga that is Facebook’s user experience, once again the mammoth social network made some abrupt changes without warning to its community.

On April 1st, Facebook changed their rules again and unleashed “community pages,” in an asinine attempt to “simplify” the already confusing issue of Pages vs. Groups.

This was not an April Fool’s joke, either.

The goal of this new “feature” is to weed out the unofficial brand pages from all the “official” ones on the network, and retain fan pages specifically for businesses, brands, public figures and official spokespeople for any of them. For example, if one wanted to make a page for a random cause or to make a statement, it would fall into the “community pages” category. Once the community page hit a certain amount of users, Facebook would hand admin privileges over to the community, thus creating a Wiki-like platform.

In every past instance of Facebook making big changes, users have protested within the network by creating hundreds of “Bring Back the Old Facebook” groups and even a few pages. However, this time there appears to be very little protesting in the social network by the addition of “community pages.”

Not because users don’t want to, but because they can’t figure out how.

“I don’t like it at all. I wish they’d bring back the old Facebook, and so do all my friends,” said Sarah Jones, a die-hard “Bring Back the Old Facebook” online protester who admins several groups. “I’d start another protest on Facebook but I can’t figure out if I should make a page, a group, or now one of these new community pages!”

Others are more suspicious of Facebook’s motives.

“I think it’s a conspiracy, Facebook is trying to confuse us so that we can’t protest all the change,” said one Facebook user and avid Obama supporter who declined to be named.

Indeed, as of this writing there are a few anti-community pages fan pages, but none have any more than three fans.

To make matters worse, Facebook also decided they are soon going to replace the “Become a Fan” button on fan pages with a “Like” button, citing better conversion on the “Like” feature within the network and increasing engagement without implication of commitment.

“I’m not a fan of removing the ‘become a fan’ button, and I don’t like the idea of just having a ‘Like’ button. Would fan pages become ‘Like’ pages?” asked one concerned Facebook protester, “I was going to make an anti-Like Button page but it wouldn’t even have ‘fans’ anyway… now I can’t figure out if it should be an anti-Like button group or page or community page to protest removing the ‘become a fan’ button AND the addition of the community pages!”

Many users have said they’re giving up and going back to MySpace, but are wary, as they got lost on the way to Facebook the last time.

It is uncertain what Facebook will decide to change next, but one thing is certain: They’ve finally found a way to quiet all the noise of whiny protesters within their network.

Image via Blackrage.org.