I only got a Facebook account way back when for no real reason. My account just sat there for the longest with just one friend from my high school days. Then he got me into playing a game. Soon the only reason I added friends was to help play Mafia Wars. That particular game was fun for a few months, but it didn't take too long to see there would never be an end result. It was your typical donkey chasing a carrot on a stick game. So I quit playing it. Facebook, itself, blew up during this time circa 2009/10 and soon I was reconnecting with old friends which was fun. It was like Myspace, but where Myspace was an atom bomb, Facebook was a hydrogen bomb. I enjoyed it. I liked seeing photos of my peers and their lives. I liked people sharing their top ten musical lists or funny videos. But then 2016 came and went like a hurricane. Suddenly people started becoming political. You were soon either/or.
And this dismayed me. I remember talking with some friends...and I mean really talking with them face to face and they said they agreed with me that they didn't want to log into Facebook to see people spout off their opinions. Sure, you're welcome to do it, but I am free to either delete you or, more benignly perhaps, just hide your timeline. The friends I was talking to began sharing their political thoughts on Facebook shortly after our conversation. Guess what? I hid those people. It didn't matter if they were left wing, right wing, or just plain nuts. I hid them. I am an equal opportunity avoider of political nonsense on Facebook.
So, what are my political views then? Do you want to dox me perhaps? Facebook actually calculates your political views. I have forgotten how to find this data, but I know when I looked it up they thought I was a Democrat. Nope. So I must be a Republican then? Nope. I'm an actual independent thinker and voter which is perhaps a rare thing these days. But, I'm not really here today to talk about the legalized crime of politics. That is just one of many irritants to infect social media. I will add something here that everybody must know deep down in their hearts to be true: no matter how many political views you post, no matter how many memes you share; it's not going to change even one person's mind. If that method works, then the country as a whole is in far worse shape than any of us can imagine.
So politics as a whole came along and made Facebook a worse place. It wasn't as much fun to hangout there. Next you can add Facebook's constant tweaking of, admittedly their environment, which gets annoying. Once you've gotten rid of the political garbage and joined some cool groups devoted to your interests the garden gets tilled and you find debris and weeds abound. I belong to lots of groups on Facebook. Some of them are devoted to the era I spent my formative years, I belong to some movie groups, and some television show groups. These groups have this in common: unless they are policed by hardcore administrators they get overrun by spammers. Even worse than that though is people who can't be bothered to look things up so people just post the same damn stuff over and over and over and over again. It's tedious.
I was accused of being a spammer recently when I linked to my Electric Cowboy festival piece posted here. I protested this since: 1. it was a reply to a comment about the festival 2. this blog isn't for profit so what good does it do me to gain traffic here? There was a convoluted response about people spamming posts just for likes. I don't need the dopamine rush of likes at Facebook. Because here's my last bit about the social media giant and then I'll get back to my regularly scheduled lack of posting here in 2021 (although there is some Martin Theatre movie listings coming in the next few months).
Facebook can shove it because nobody really cares that much anymore anyways (never mind this screed which proves I might care just a little I suppose). Nobody under the age of 21 or so maintains anything much there. I know my own children rarely do anything there. Heck, my youngest doesn't have an account and I doubt he ever will get one. Nobody really cares that much about your vacation photos or about the fact that you have coffee every morning. That funny meme you just shared has been shared by 10 or more people today and it wasn't even all that funny when it first appeared 5 years ago. Another thing; have you ever noticed how much snark is on there? So many people try to be funny in their comments and it all gets so tiresome. Or even worse, they try to be the smartest person. I've had enough of smartest people. I've had enough of dumb people. I've even had enough of myself some days. I'm going to go back to the way it was before I joined that data collecting wretched hive of scum and villainy.
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