I’ve had it with Facebook.
As you may know, for years now I’ve had a professional page at Facebook (as opposed to a personal profile, which I also have) for my writing at www.facebook.com/mjohansonwriter. It used to bring in a decent amount of traffic… but then Facebook started limiting who saw my posts there unless I paid to “boost” them. Which I did a few times, just to see what happened, and it didn’t make much difference. My page at this moment has 1,563 Likes and 1,371 Follows, and I’m lucky if something I post there gets seen by 200 people. Most posts get far less visibility. This is absurd.
And then yesterday The New York Times published an incredibly infuriating piece about how Facebook has been abusing the information we give them in even more insidious ways than we had previously known. A taste:
For years, Facebook gave some of the world’s largest technology companies more intrusive access to users’ personal data than it has disclosed, effectively exempting those business partners from its usual privacy rules, according to internal records and interviews.
…
Facebook allowed Microsoft’s Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users’ friends without consent, the records show, and gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages.
…
In all, the deals described in the documents benefited more than 150 companies — most of them tech businesses, including online retailers and entertainment sites, but also automakers and media organizations. Their applications sought the data of hundreds of millions of people a month, the records show. The deals, the oldest of which date to 2010, were all active in 2017. Some were still in effect this year.
So this is it: effective as of yesterday, I am longer updating that Facebook page. (I’ve also deleted my Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, and which also has done absolutely zip to raise my profile or increase traffic here.)
I don’t mind if anyone wants to continue (or start!) sharing my work on Facebook — that’s entirely up to you. This is just me staging what small protest I can.
If you had Liked that page, or Followed it, I apologize for any annoyance or inconvenience this will cause you. Though you probably hadn’t been seeing my posts in your feed anyway.
If you want to keep up with what I’m doing without having to pop in here to the site all the time, here are some other options:
• Twitter: @maryannjohanson
• Pinterest: @maryannjohanson and the FlickFilosopher.com board specifically
• Letterboxd: @maryannjohanson
• Patreon: @maryannjohanson (You do not have to be a paid supporter there in order to see a feed with links back to my most of my stuff here. But it would awesome if you did make a pledge.)
• Apple News: FlickFilosopher.com channel
• Weekly Daily Digest email (sent only when there are posts, of course; I will never ever share your email address with anyone): sign up here
• RSS feed: here (does anyone still use RSS?)
Only the Weekly Daily Digest email and RSS feed offer a complete rundown of everything I post here; the others offer varying types of curation and occasional other stuff. (Each platform has its own personality.) If there are other options I can be offering you, please do let me know!
Yes, can confirm that people still use RSS!
Also, to hell with Facebook.
Which of those aren’t centralised services, that depend on some other tech company just as much as you depended on Facebook? Daily digest email and RSS. And strangely enough, that’s how I follow the site.
(Well, the site RSS feed uses Feedburner, so it’s helping Google track its users; and the daily digest email is done through an advertising company that also replaces links with special tracking links; but there are ways round both of those problems, you can move to a different provider if you want to in a way that you can’t with Facebook, and they’re way better than the other options.)
As a one-person independent entity here, I’m limited in what I can offer. I cannot develop my own apps or sites that won’t track users’ data or sell their information.
Absolutely.
Unless you’re, to a first approximation, me, you have to go to someone to get this stuff done for you; and pretty much all the someones you can go to reduce their prices by adding user tracking, usually without even giving you the option to pay more to turn it off.
Bring back zines! :-)
I published zines. They were expensive to print and mail, they took a lot longer to produce, and they only got tiny readerships.
And rage against machines! Oh, right. You’re already doing that…
You may actually find that having fewer choices helps. There is already too much competing technology, so use what works best for you.
Your email notifications work just fine for me. :)