Off with the Facebook

For about a couple of years I’ve been building this dislike towards parts of the social media.

While there are lots of reasons, they can be divided to two — personal reasons, and reasons that affect the non-profit organization I run (for Type 1 Diabetics).

Personal

My personal loathing is mainly targeted at Facebook and some of it at Instagram, too.

It has been growing exponentially because both of the services — Facebook particularly — are messing up things when it comes to how status updates, posts and their reactions are been showed to us.

The clear #1 shitty thing is that basically nowhere in Facebook the default sorting of stuff is chronological. The same problem is present in Instagram, but not anyway as big as it is in Facebook.

Facebook’s algorithms are working hard trying to show content which would actually really interest the user, but fails at this miserably.

You can see this e.g. by refreshing the main view of Facebook a few times. On every refresh the content changes, and sure as hell it’s not in a chronological order.

In some views you can find the motherfuckingly small non-button which says “sort” in tiny letters, and choose the chronological order from there. But come on, I’m not going to choose that every time I enter a new view.

Maybe I’m just too old school when I think lovingly of the ancient forums and blogs which had their shit together regarding chronological sorting. To the younger people this still should be a familiar thing from WhatsApp or other messenger platforms.

Imagine if the same changes would come to WhatsApp, and suddenly you would see all of the thousands of messages in a rabbits-ass-random order. So when you shout to you friend in WA, he/she will see that in a couple of weeks, and in the meantime will travel in a fucked up random time warp of messages.

We are to blame, too

On the other hand my irritation levels have rised because of the way we use Facebook.

Nowadays it’s more a rule than an exception that people just go and comment to any post before reading any of the comments which probably already e.g. have the original question answered. As a result a post which has a genuine question in it has hundreds of identical answers when they are not needed. And of course those are not in chronological order. And yes, I do this too.

In other news, the way we consume social media is all about this fucking scroll-scroll-scroll-stop-scroll-scroll-scroll thing, and in the end of the day we wake up with the fact that 50% of the day was just some brainless scrolling. Wait no, we can’t wake up to that because we’re too concentrated to the scrolling.

We should give our eyes some free time from the screen. Let’s talk, or at least stare at the wall. Let’s hug each other more, and do something together (not necessarily talking about relationships here). Instead of checking your phone at the grocery store cashier line, how about smiling to the cashier with your phone in your pocket for a change.

For my part, I already left Instagram. I’m also going to leave Facebook this coming spring, when my duties regarding that non-profit end (I need my private account as a part of our marketing strategy). Twitter, nah.. don’t use it personally, at least now.

But I did find an astonishingly great platform for us who are keen to express themselves visually, or musically etc. it’s called Vero (which btw means “tax” in Finnish), and you should check my profile there.

Vero is far more relaxed somehow than any other service, and believe it or not, there seems to be stuff happening chronologically. Instant love.

In the eyes of a non-profit

A couple of years or so — can’t remember exactly — Mark Zuckerberg described in a press event how Facebook would make some radical changes to the visibility of organizations in the platform.

The reachability of organizations would be drastically reduced, as Facebook was making a turn to become more human friendly (wtf). OK fine, I get it when it comes to businesses built to generate profit.

But what about non-profits whose mission is usually for general good of people? Well, we’re in the same pool with the corporations etc.

So starting from that announcement or some time around it, our analytics tell us what we already know. Let’s create a fictional scenario, though it’s actually straight comparable to any of our experiences.

• We’ll publish a post of some of our upcoming events on our Facebook Page
• No matter when or where the event is happening (we cover the whole country)
• Before the changes I mentioned earlier, we would normally reach a bit over 1000 unique eye pairs.
• If we shared the post to some of the closed groups we operate in too, the total reach would multiply, sometimes reaching the 10 000 limit.
• After the changes, in an identical scenario, we would reach about tens (yes, really) to at maximum a few hundred people by posting on our Facebook Page.
• By sharing to the closed groups, we nowadays usually get 20–50 more people reached (the groups consist of thousands of people)
• To make matters worst, if you include a) an url or b) a location or c) a date in your post (which is kind of our thing), FB algorithms depreciate the post radically more. Also, no text to images.

So a little bit of contrast between old and current results. And yes, every fucking trick has been tried and tested in an endless search for a working solution.

Basically we have to do 10–100x the work these days to reach the same mass of people. And when even throwing money at Facebook ads doesn’t work, fuck it.

In Instagram the situation is not yet so catastrophic, but no doubt it will be when you follow Facebook’s decision making in the open.

Focusing on life

Sorry about the rant, but would do it again happily.

However, maybe it’s a good thing that Facebook is driving me away as a user (and a non-profit user), since I know I will have far more time to concentrate to increasimg my time off the phone.

At the moment I’m in Riga, Latvia on my first overseas trip with a wheelchair. Today I’ve had the pleasure to witness a marvelous classical concert (had me in tears), chat face-to-face with a funny young Bolt driver (like Uber but in Latvia), and enjoy a perfect duck in the hotel’s roof restaurant. The non-alcoholic drink crowned the day.

This day made me extremely happy, despite my ongoing medical problems. This rant also felt so good to write. Please smile with me ❤️.