I am fed up with social media. Yes, I know, a blog is social media, but let us refer to it as old school, or static, social media: it does not roll over completely every few seconds-to-minutes, nor is it expected to.
I love the ease of interaction and accessibility to my readers that Facebook offers. Facebook, however, seems to be deliberately and actively trying to make the public pages unusable for the person running it–ie, me.
At the moment, between the enormous size of the cover photo (which, once set, cannot be unset) and the pay-for-promotion, new messages, new likes, insights, tips and whatever other crap they’re front-loading, I cannot see any of the page content until I have scrolled down an entire screen length. And that’s with my screen maximized. Yes, I can collapse the admin stuff (but not the cover image), but I have to do it every time I come back to the page, and I don’t stay on the page all the time. Nor am I going to.
I’m also never going to pay to promote any of my posts, which means every inch of the page is wasted space. But just to complicate things further, they’ve done something bizarre to the comments system there, and it no longer goes oldest-to-newest, but apparently “newest to oldest unless something has a direct reply in which case it gets bumped to the top but it all has a time lag so they seem to jump around and it’s very difficult to tell what’s been posted most recently or not.”
G+ makes slightly more sense, except it also has a system where once a cover photo is set you can’t unset it, which just pisses me off. And furthermore, if you upload an image the same size as their default cover image, it tells you that image is too small. WTF. And although one can nominally set sliders to determine how much of what Circle one wants in one’s feed, after half an hour or more of searching I couldn’t *actually* figure out how to do that. I have a suspicion you need to be using Chrome or something. :p (Ah. Someone just told me they got rid of the slider and how to arrange that now. *sigh*)
I’m also still not certain people are actually using G+, and what I would prefer to use it for is an automatic cross-post from this blog…which isn’t, as far as I can tell, possible. Which is why *I* don’t use G+, and which realistically may be why I never get in the habit of it.
To my surprise, Twitter is turning out to be the least irritating–but also the least threaded-conversation-based, of course–of the social media I use.
Honestly, I’m fed up. I’ve had readers tell me they won’t follow me off Facebook/etc to this blog, and I get that. Facebook is very convenient for people wanting to access me. It is no longer, however, at all convenient for *me*, and I’m just about done with it all.
There is an extension called Social Fixer for Facebook that is the only reason I have not given up on FB a long time ago. It seems to fix most of the usability issues I had. I’m not sure about pages because I don’t have one, but you might want to check out Social Fixer dot com. I use Chrome, but it appears they have a tool for just about every browser but IE. (I have no connection to this tool except that I use it. I feel the same way you do about FB but I also have people who would not follow me from it, so I try to make do!)
I appear, at this stage, to be unwilling to employ another app to deal with interface issues. I want them to do it right, or sod them. :P
I’m also beginning to feel that if people can’t/won’t come to the blog, that’s fine, but perhaps I should be considering that their problem, not mine.
I have your Blog on my favoriates and I check it out every day. I really enjoy it. I would still follow you no matter what you decide.
<3! :)
So like, I don’t read a damn thing you post on facebook, nor anyone else for that matter and I don’t feel my life is at a loss for it.
I know it’s your profession so maybe you don’t want to make people have to do something silly like I dunno, google for you, to seek you out, but I also don’t think it would hurt them. People didn’t have such easy access to authors before, and they really don’t need it now imo. And I say this as someone who’s enjoyed easy access to authors.
If I like your books I like them whether or not your my friend or not. And if you’re my friend, well then you’re mind friend, regardless of any books you may or may not write.
I guess what I am trying to say is, I think readers can deal with less of you on facebook and if you can’t, you may not miss them. It’s not like you’re hard to find on the internet away from facebook.
I know. It’s just a nice feature. :)
correction … if you can’t should be if THEY can’t. :D engrish.
I’m old school. I don’t use FB but I do enjoy your blog.
<3!
I followed your blog long before you were on facebook and even though I see what you post on fb, I still check your blog regularly. Perhaps obsessively…lol. I go where you go…are…. oh, you know what I mean:)
And I love you for it. :)