Facebook - A Follow-up Mea Culpa from me

It was kindly brought to my attention that my post yesterday about leaving Facebook came across as sulky sour-grapes—which, upon re-reading it, I agree. It did.

Because I assumed people were mind-readers and would fill in all the blanks I left empty. Stupid Me.

Some background. If you aren’t aware, there are facebook accounts and facebook pages.

An account is you “The Individual”. You have friends.

A page is a persona, activity, club, etc. It has followers and likes.

I had a personal account, with a handful of family ‘friends’ who rarely communicate via facebook because we aren’t a particularly communicative bunch.

I also had an author page with a couple dozen handfuls of followers and likes. A majority of my followers were other authors. But there were a few readers, and random people who stumbled upon the page and pressed ‘follow’.

Now when you publish something to a page, less than 20% of your followers see it. If you want them all to see it, you have to pay Facebook.

Screw Facebook.

As an incredibly slow writer and a not particularly social person, I don’t have much to say. Yet Facebook was constantly at me to publish stuff, and to encourage followers and likes, etc. because that helps feed the facebook advertising machine.

Screw Facebook.

And then there is all the evil that facebook has accomplished with its echo chambers of hate, trolls, etc, etc.

Screw facebook.

Perhaps some day when I have a million fans and a million copy best seller on the NYT list and I’m turning down calls to go on CNN, I’ll rejoin facebook, but for now:

Screw facebook.