I have been thumbing down through Facebook for a couple of weeks now. I changed my profile picture, and got some likes, and felt the dopamine hit that comes from that. As I scroll, I have found that there are so many feeds suggested that are just stupid shit. ‘Shania Twain wore a dress and fans were disgusted.’ Paraphrasing, and hating even bringing it up as an example, because I have more respect for Shania Twain than that. Secondly, this is Supermarket checkout stand gossip rag quality material. It is low and stupid. It has been despicable since the National Enquirer and the like published stories about things like Lizard Aliens meeting with the President, or there is a face on Mars, and it is Satan’s, and it appears to be talking. They got hold of the weak-minded idiots in this country with that crap, and demonstrated to the likes of Rupert Murdoch that there is an audience for absolute garbage, as long as it is put in an authentic looking wrapper, and sold as truth. Zuckerberg must be so proud selling his soul down the same river of filth in the name of easy money. I remember when Facebook was “social media.” Social? I think not. The friends are just there to add another layer of motivation among the ads and the honey-scented bullshit that piles onto a user while they waste their lives away, scrolling, and following the rabbit trails that lead to nowhere substantive.
This is not my intellectual assessment of what I have done with the last few weeks of scrolling. It is just an opinionated summary of it. Trouble is, I need to get word out that I have services on offer here from a home-based business. It is a fairly inexpensive means to do a little of that, but it is not an effective one, especially as Facebook does not put business posts in front of people, and I am not even sure the ones it does are people I even know. I keep my social page, and my business page, and when I have put my post on both, I got almost no engagement at all on the business page, but plenty of opportunities to “boost post.” The personal post got a normal amount of interaction as I think I could expect compared to something like, say, updating my profile picture and receiving likes and comments. Facebook demands I pay to play on my business page and barely shows me to my friends on my social page, best I can tell.
Well, if I want to be ignored and only paid attention to by Russian bots, then I have this page for that. And my other webpages. I pay for those myself. I can post what I like. I get no interference from ads and from other rubbish, such as gossip or outright lies that the user has to filter through in order to see what matters. I have always prided myself on maintaining an ad-free environment on all of my webpages. I have also prided myself on honesty. I may not share everything openly here as privacy is my prerogative. But what I do put is the truth to me, and I try to operate a good BS filter in life, dismissing the gossipy horse manure, and brushing aside the stupid conspiratorial-end-of-the-world garbage that seems to get people reading from wasted paper and poorly used electricity. We have something so astonishingly sophisticated as computers all networked together to form a global machine and use it to read that a dead singer is not really dead, but has been sensibly abducted by aliens, who apparently have the same awesome desire to misappropriate their highest technological accomplishments as we do! Be buggered. That sounds just like human inventiveness to me!
So, if anyone is interested in something like, having a log sawn to boards, or buying some candles, or commissioning some photography, I have opportunities for that. My wife can help with artistic creations. Together we have many ways to help others that we are interested in sharing. No scrolling, no filtering. Just us.