Away from Facebook
Craig Mod, in his newsletter:
I want to step away from Instagram. Many reasons why. The biggest is the “fool me once … shame on me. Fool me, like, you know, fifteen times …” feeling I have with much of social media. Facebook has collapsed as a viable marketing / distribution platform for me. Twitter is fine, but the audience trends heavily to certain demographics. And as lovely as Instagram has been, with the loss of its cofounders in 2018, I feel like we are entering the Death By Monetization/Optimization™ spiral that Facebook is so very good at.
Part of what made Facebook a breath of fresh air ten years ago was its relative minimalism compared to MySpace, etc. Now it’s a full-blown space shuttle interface.
Repeat for Messenger.
And, now, repeat once again for Instagram. Instagram will only get more complex, less knowable, more algorithmic, more engagement-hungry in 2019.
I want to have a place very far apart from that, where I can post photos on my own terms.
Yup.
I launched the new sawyerpaul.com last winter, and I’ve been so happy with how it works, because it’s just text files. What you’re reading is a text file that lives in dropbox. It’s delightful. But more than anything, it’s not attached to any other thing. A company can’t decide that porn isn’t allowed anymore and I have to leave. I won’t get blocked for using a bad word. I won’t be guilted to come back if I leave for a few weeks.
Facebook is a bad company, run by people who wish us harm. As of November, my usage of their products looked like this:
- Messenger
As of December, it looks like this:
- Messenger
If you didn’t know, you can delete your Facebook and keep Messenger. I know that’s why a lot of people keep it. So, that’s a freebie.
What’s harder is getting rid of the others. But hey, that’s what new years’ resolutions are for.