Facebook has become a known and common method of communicating with friends, family, associates and all manner of folks. It is a beast. It is huge… and it will do as it pleases.
Social media in general has come under fire for being a terrible thing that allows people to do and say rotten things to each other. It has become a storm of political hyperbole and equally outlandish backlash. I have grown to hate it. I joined Failbook almost a decade ago. It’s stunning to put it that way. Ten years of “like this post” and everything that goes with it, but now I am reconsidering.
The platform itself has privacy and security issues. To paraphrase some younger folks I know, “DUH!”. A socially connected computer program that reaches millions of people is going to have issues. That many people can’t be mixed together and have everything come out perfect. Just can’t happen. The biggest solution to that is I don’t put things out there that I don’t want others to know or that aren’t already public knowledge. I don’t connect it to my bank information or anything that I can’t drop or replace (yes, that includes my phone – it would be a pain in the ass, but I could do it).
It doesn’t connect my website posts automatically anymore. I will admit this is annoying. I prefer to work here when I can and link this site over. It used to be an automated thing, and now it doesn’t work. I have a series of developer messages that would require some amount of research and picking and pecking here on the site to get the connection to work again. I am not a web developer. I am not a programmer. I maintain this site on my own with my bare minimum amount of knowledge. Bluntly I don’t want to spend my time on a web site. Every bit of time I spend working on a web site problem or looking up programming connections or whatever other nonsense doesn’t work now is just more time away from the work I want to be doing. I don’t want to be a programmer, just an author.
Even if I could get it to work, there’s a fair chance nobody would see it anyway. The Failbook folks have decided that your small business links shouldn’t be seen in everyone’s feed… just the big companies that they work with. The site itself is worse than any needy significant other you have ever had. Constant messages about new posts, new friend suggestions, things YOU’VE MISSED! OH MY GOD WHY ARE YOU NOT ON THERE LOOKING AT THIS THING RIGHT NOW!?! They will do anything in a desperate attempt to capture your attention. They want you to scroll and click and like and all the other crap they’ve got going on. It has become intensely annoying. I have complained about it, out loud, frequently. This prompted my wife to yell at me, “Quit bitching! That’s how they make money. You react, you check, you click and they get paid. If you don’t like it, get off there and shut up about it!”
She’s not wrong. The purest distillation from that is a single fact. What you put up there IS NOT YOURS. I’m sure there’s a volume of legal mumbo-jumbo somewhere that declares what words are yours to use or not use and how they can collect it and catalog it and… whatever. It’s all bullshit and it’s not yours. They hold all the keys. They want to change something, they will. They want to deny you access, they will. You get the point. That is why I go through the trouble to maintain this site. It is mine (to the extent that any web based service is truly possessed). If I want to turn the whole thing purple I can. I will post as I please, when I please and all six of my readers will still see my words (after they check their news aggregators because this isn’t cross posting any more). I like the simplicity of it. It’s not going to win any awards, but it is mine. All the changes, all the anger, frustration and screaming into the void over what Failbook should or shouldn’t do amount to nothing. In the end it hasn’t dramatically changed my true friendships. It’s nice to be able to connect, but then I was also on Myspace and Livejournal. We see how those turned out.
I’m planning on staying on Failbook for now, but I’m not jumping through the hoops to make posts from here connect. Their site really isn’t worth the effort.