I May Have to Quit You, FB
The bloom is definitely off the rose. Damn I am really starting to hate Facebook, rather than merely find it exasperating.
The first couple years I was on it, say 2008 to 2011, it was a pretty fun place to be, believe it or not. Reconnecting with people you lost track of since high school or college was a rewarding experience. And seeing what the folks in my home town were up to (since I could only go up there 4 or 5 times a year there myself) made me feel less left out. The feelings of social isolation I had been plagued with for the previous decade ebbed away.
Then it slowly turned sour.
As more and more people joined, my own contributions were ironically less read and commented on - people stopped going to the pages of others, and instead relied exclusively on the “newsfeed”, where my content quickly become buried, submerged in a sea of increasing mediocrity and irrelevance. Then the ads appeared, and inevitably began taking up more of the screen. Then there were other things that were not ads per se, but “suggested” posts - still, they were like ads in that they were not created by anyone you knew. Then there was the FB messenger app you needed to get to send/read texts from your phone (in ADDITION to the FB app itself). Then there is the increasing censorship, which is a matter of record, along with the sinister spying and sifting of our content (remember my post last week about the casino? I cross-posted the same thing on FB and the next day there were ads for poker games in my feed.)
And then there is just the tiresome cacophony due to simple human banality. The incessant crap in my newsfeed is currently inescapable: people “liking” or commenting to other people that I don’t know, will never meet, and don’t give a shit about, photo after photo of kids playing sportsball (“look, that red speck over there is Bobby in right field!”), the “shares” of “inspiring wisdom”, the self-righteous pronouncements, the humble-bragging, fuglies deluding each other by saying how gorgeous everyone is and how everyone’s kids are adorable (when they look like annoying little shits or homely losers to me), the moms talking about how BUSY they are, the passive-aggressive “vaguebooking” hinting at familial/relationship drama, the snarky one-sided political posturing, the repugnant virtue signaling, and so forth. I genuinely work to be creative and witty, to provide actual CONTENT that my friends might find informative or entertaining. Is it too much to ask others to do the same?
At least half of my time on FB is now spent hiding people, sites and apps I don’t want to see. I once naively thought that after I blocked like, 2,000 people (friends of friends) and the pointless emanations from 1,000 apps I might finally have a feed where I care about most of the stuff I scroll by, but NO.
Why is it so damn impossible for me to just have a feed that shows what I want it to show, and nothing else? Is that too much to ask? Would it really be so injurious to FB’s bottom line?
Now we have the latest source of clutter: “Suggested because it’s popular on Facebook”, AKA, a lot of other ignoramuses liked this crap, so surely you will, too! I resent being constantly prodded to augment some contrived positive feedback loop. The purpose of Facebook is more or less completely corrupted, its original vision hopelessly compromised. Only social inertia is keeping this insensible behemoth aloft amidst the swirling maelstrom of the internet.
The first couple years I was on it, say 2008 to 2011, it was a pretty fun place to be, believe it or not. Reconnecting with people you lost track of since high school or college was a rewarding experience. And seeing what the folks in my home town were up to (since I could only go up there 4 or 5 times a year there myself) made me feel less left out. The feelings of social isolation I had been plagued with for the previous decade ebbed away.
Then it slowly turned sour.
As more and more people joined, my own contributions were ironically less read and commented on - people stopped going to the pages of others, and instead relied exclusively on the “newsfeed”, where my content quickly become buried, submerged in a sea of increasing mediocrity and irrelevance. Then the ads appeared, and inevitably began taking up more of the screen. Then there were other things that were not ads per se, but “suggested” posts - still, they were like ads in that they were not created by anyone you knew. Then there was the FB messenger app you needed to get to send/read texts from your phone (in ADDITION to the FB app itself). Then there is the increasing censorship, which is a matter of record, along with the sinister spying and sifting of our content (remember my post last week about the casino? I cross-posted the same thing on FB and the next day there were ads for poker games in my feed.)
And then there is just the tiresome cacophony due to simple human banality. The incessant crap in my newsfeed is currently inescapable: people “liking” or commenting to other people that I don’t know, will never meet, and don’t give a shit about, photo after photo of kids playing sportsball (“look, that red speck over there is Bobby in right field!”), the “shares” of “inspiring wisdom”, the self-righteous pronouncements, the humble-bragging, fuglies deluding each other by saying how gorgeous everyone is and how everyone’s kids are adorable (when they look like annoying little shits or homely losers to me), the moms talking about how BUSY they are, the passive-aggressive “vaguebooking” hinting at familial/relationship drama, the snarky one-sided political posturing, the repugnant virtue signaling, and so forth. I genuinely work to be creative and witty, to provide actual CONTENT that my friends might find informative or entertaining. Is it too much to ask others to do the same?
At least half of my time on FB is now spent hiding people, sites and apps I don’t want to see. I once naively thought that after I blocked like, 2,000 people (friends of friends) and the pointless emanations from 1,000 apps I might finally have a feed where I care about most of the stuff I scroll by, but NO.
Why is it so damn impossible for me to just have a feed that shows what I want it to show, and nothing else? Is that too much to ask? Would it really be so injurious to FB’s bottom line?
Now we have the latest source of clutter: “Suggested because it’s popular on Facebook”, AKA, a lot of other ignoramuses liked this crap, so surely you will, too! I resent being constantly prodded to augment some contrived positive feedback loop. The purpose of Facebook is more or less completely corrupted, its original vision hopelessly compromised. Only social inertia is keeping this insensible behemoth aloft amidst the swirling maelstrom of the internet.