About 8 months ago, I re-registered for Facebook. In the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica fiasco, and the follow on hits of their handing excessive autonomy to phone and hardware manufacturers to sift through their treasure-trove of user data, I shut down and deleted my account(s).
For almost 2 years I remained blissfully off the platform, but picking up the hobby of RC Cars drew me back. Why?
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Friday July 6th marks a full month without Facebook. As soon as the second week transpired, I got the notifications of all the other “attached” bits being severed. A good sign that I had held out the full two weeks. Apparently once they “delete” (cough cough) your account, it takes about 90 days to tag your data for removal, and for it being removed1 from their servers.
I have removed the hosts file redirection of facebook.com to localhost. The temptation to go back to it has waned. I have refocused some energy on this blog (and my other greytbros head over and see some fun about our new family addition). (more…)
This isn’t about me, it is about you. Seriously. I knew that you were abhorrent in your privacy practices. That you encourage people to over share, and that in the guise of creating a community, you have built walled silos and self reinforcing echo chambers. I knew that, and I continued to ritualistically log in, to swipe and share funny memes, to shake my head at obvious fake news (oh, when The Onion and The Borowitz report are the rational seeming posts), to make like minded friends (again, with the reinforcing of my biases), and to laugh and bond with my virtual friends. (more…)
As I mentioned on Friday, I am taking a break from Facebook. I did a little bit of this in mid 2015, and one of the hard lessons learned was how pervasive Facebook is across the web for the SSO (single sign on) convenience. Sigh.
At that time, I was astounded at how many places that Facebook had wormed their way into for validation and authentication. My Strava, Spotify, and others were all tied to my identity on Facebook.
Fortunately, at that time I bit the bullet and did much of the extrication from reliance on the Facebook identity and authentication, so this break isn't quite as bad.
Then this morning, I sat down to do some light (or heavy blogging), and fired up the Pandora app on my iphone to listen to some soothing classical.
You guessed it, the app, even though I am signed in by email/password, was insistent that I "fix" my facebook connection. Finally, after the third try, it realized that indeed I do not have a valid facebook account right now.
Jesus christ monkeyballs, that was a raft of stupidity.
I am sure that as time goes on, I will find more shenanigans to work through.
One thing is sure though, this pervasiveness is leaning me towards fully deleting my Facebook profile.
There is a closed community that I participate in on Facebook that I have been a member of for about 7 months. I was invited to join, and I thought I had found a den of like minded people to share our common goals. It was an amazing and safe place to hang out. Really cool people, sharing really cool things, and very little judgmental attitudes were in the air.
Yes, there were some diversions, and some conflict, heck it is impossible that with > 3,000 members there had to be some differences in opinion.
Yet as the group grew it changed. At about 6,000 members, there was a notable shift in the civility. Some genuine nastiness was creeping in. (for the record, occasionally a true dissenter would get past the selection process, but they usually outed themselves quickly and disappeared)
Now that the membership is well above 9,000, the group has become somewhat toxic. The moderators had to be ever vigilant for banned material being posted. The selfie threads turning into misogyny, and rape references, and a level of nastiness that really appalled me.
All through this process I loved the group. There was an evolving core group of great people, many who have become friends on my profile. We would share amusing pictures, memes and experiences. It was fun. They are great people. I found that about 90% of the time I spent on FB was in that group, and it felt like home.
Almost 100% of my posts and shares were in this group. I am sure my real friends wondered where I had disappeared to.
However, the toxicity of the group (I will admit that the admins were doing an admirable job to try to control the chaos) has made me stop following it, and stop receiving notifications from the group. I just decided to go cold turkey. The straw that broke the camel’s back was a fun meme I posted mocking Justin Bieber generated a shitstorm of hate. If you can’t mock Bieber, then it isn’t worth staying.
Something surprising happened. My news feed became relevant again. I started interacting with my friends, and I feel less like a slave to continue to post to that group.
I am enjoying Facebook more than I had for a while. It is a good thing.
I may not ever go back to that group.
I manage a couple of facebook pages, one for my employer, and one for a non-profit that I work with (Southern Arizona Greyhound Adoption).
I am constantly barraged by Facebook to “promote” a post to extend its reach, and get more responses. We recently took in a hound who had an injury on the racetrack, and we are doing some fundraising to cover the not insignificant vet costs.
Our marketing team wanted to try to promote this post to see what the result would be.
So, I signed up for it, gave them my Paypal information, and put a $15 limit. They said that the post would reach between 3,000 and 4,000 people.
4,022 people saw this post over the next 24 hours on their wall. Of this 87 people clicked on the post, or 2.1%. 7 people “liked” our page. Our website had 30 extra visitors that day (almost indetectable in the long trend), and not one additional donation.
I posted it on my timeline, with a plea for my friends to cough up a buck or tow if they could afford it. That generated the ONLY donation that we have received that wasn’t in our existing network.
My conclusion is:
Oh, and if you want to help us out, and do something for the awesome greyhounds, head over to this link and click the “donate” button.