Okay, so I did it. It wasn’t as hard for me as it is for others, but I snipped it. I cut it. I pulled the plug.
I broke up with Mark Zuckerberg.
Some friends might have known that I was toying with the idea for awhile, but I finally did it.
We all talk the talk. We complain and say we’re going to take the steps. For many reasons: lack of engagement with posts, hurt feelings, toxic commenters, a failed business, exiled from an organization, broken friendships, data safety, boycotting big corp, a stalker, and the list can continue.
Sometimes, all it takes is a brief brush with just one or two of those reasons above and you start to think, why do I put so much time into this?
Personally, I’ve ran several Facebook pages, personal profiles, and Facebook groups (by now, even in 2021, people somehow don’t know the difference between these three). To get views, likes, and shares, you need to get the attention of others; you have to show up in their news feed. On Facebook, you have to actually spend money to get attention.
Even if you have built up a large following, you still have to end up in others’ feeds to get those views, likes, and shares. When people start liking and sharing your posts, that’s when you will get even more likes and shares. They call it going viral.
If you’re a business person, you might have to get a thousand views (of just one post) to get 100 interactions. That might mean 2 sales of your book or CD. For a Facebook ad or post boost, you usually have to drop big dollars just to get minimal interactions.
I can’t do it anymore.
Facebook’s owner, Mark Zuckerberg, is worth $137,000,000 (as of November 2021), and Facebook was launched only in 2004. It’s a free service, so you know what that means. If you’re not paying cash for a product, YOU are the product. Everything you enter onto Facebook is stored and sold.
I’m not a privacy expert, so I can’t go into the details that are more readily accessible from more qualified writers, but I do know that only big corporations and big governments can afford to place a man like Zuckerberg into the Top Five richest people in the world.
And he laughs.
A lot has been done to try to stop him from “taking over the world” with his Harvard dormitory invention, but no one will stop him. He’s also purchased businesses from his competitors, like WhatsApp and Instagram. There are many other small acquisitions that don’t even make the headlines because it’s so often, and he acquires them during their infancy stages.
And he laughs some more.
My brands will survive—both my authorship brand and my acting brand—without Facebook. Most of my auditions come by email or text, and my book sales never really increased no matter how much promotional marketing I paid for on Facebook. Most of my posts on my Facebook business/brand pages are ignored or missed, based on algorithms.
People just don’t see the posts, or they’re distracted by something more silly, like kitten videos or hateful Qanon re-shares.
Unless people purposely go looking for an outdated post about my writing or film appearances, they archive themselves into the Facebook void, probably making Zuckerberg a couple dollars somehow; selling it to some company or government. Corporations and government entities are the ones that want to know who I follow, what political books I’m writing, what agency I’m frequently messaging, and what civil rights film I’m attached to.
It’s not paranoia. I don’t do anything wrong. I just don’t like being used. I don’t get much love from Facebook.
I used to think that if I get people to like and follow my author or acting pages, I’ll make more sales or book future projects. Not really; nothing that seems to stand out. My book posts don’t get the likes or reference clicks. My acting page never brought a stranger to my inbox saying that they want to offer me a role based on my Facebook page.
It’s just not worth it.
MySpace came and went. Friendster came and went. Facebook is changing into Meta, and will eventually go (otherwise, why the re-brand?). People everywhere are logging off. Kids and teens don’t even rank Facebook in their top five choices for social media usage. The upcoming generation simply is not using Facebook.
I hate big business. I hate filthy rich people. I hate being used.
Many are logging off of Facebook for a few days as a boycott, but I urge others to go one step further: DEACTIVATE.
You can text friends and family. There are other ways to be in the know. There is email, RSS, Twitter (yes, that’s another story!), Discord.
Or maybe see people face-to-face?
Steve Dustcircle 
Reblogged this on Some View on the World and commented:
It is a pity so many thousands of people waste time scrolling through messages on Facebook often just watching titles pass by, because we noticed that it are only a very few, not to say a negligible number of readers.
Some years ago we also invested money in Facebook advertisements in the hope of getting more readers, to no avail (= just a lot of money wasted).
We got even some articles taken off publication because of so-called not authorised content’, it showing photos of refugee camps. Strange, we being able to see far more shocking and more nudity content on Facebook accounts and Facebook pages than on our pages.
To reach people directly there are Messenger & Whatsapp, plus several other media tools, some a little bit dodgy also used on the darknet. (!?!)
The best way for getting people to read articles is just by using a good editor system and a good web provider. From our experience, we generate the most views on WordPress, followed by Google, with its Google Sites, Blogger and Blogspots (that had some problems last year, which seem to be resolved).
We can see that social media is also connected with generations and as such the youngsters are not so interested in Facebook, spending most of their time on TikTok and some other apps, which try to lure them away from Facebook. Though they do not seem a public interested in reading serious material.
Those who want to be taken seriously should also know the (relative) impact of social media and should better concentrate and spend their time on writing their articles and publishing them on reliable and respectful channels.