I’m Here for You Facebook: 7 Helpful Hints

Last updated on: April 8, 2016 at 7:38 am by Anne Kennedy

I’m Here for You Facebook: 7 Helpful Hints 2016-04-08T07:38:49-04:00 Anne Kennedy

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We may indeed be facing the apocalypse. Bloomberg reports a tragedy of magnificent proportions,

“Facebook Inc. is working to combat a decline in people sharing original, personal content, the fuel that helps power the money machine at the heart of its social network, according to people familiar with the matter.”
Did you catch that? Some of us, well, more like most of us, have backed off sharing personal content on Facebook and that’s affecting their bottom line. This is really bad, really really bad, not only for the economy, but for humanity in general. If you don’t continually keep your soul out front on social media, how can the money makers expect to keep making money? Don’t panic, though, Facebook is working hard to get you to share more of what matters,
“Facebook has tried several tactics to encourage more of these posts, such as an ‘On This Day’ feature launched last year that brings up memories from past years that users might want to talk about again, or reminders about special occasions like Mother’s Day. Facebook has also prompted users to post the most recent photos and other recently accessed content from their phones.”

They’ve also gone out of their way to make it easy for you to put up short videos, so I need to get right on that.

I have some personal and loving advice for Facebook. I care about humanity, and I want everyone to become rich and successful, of course, and so here are some things Facebook could do to make my life easier, which, in turn, will maybe make them even richer.

1. Stop telling me what to do. I desperately hate going to Facebook a couple of times a day and having to wade past the admonitions to post about whatever the day requires. I am, by nature, rebellious. If you tell me to post about what I’m doing about Valentine’s Day, not only am I not going to post, I might even scrap all my plans and not celebrate at all, because you’ve just inserted yourself even more into my already cluttered mental space. Back off Facebook. Stop bossing me around.
2. Don’t target ads to me. If you need to advertise, then curate an interesting assortment of beautiful advertising that is meritorious in its own right and not directly aimed at me. You are already abysmally failing to properly target me with advertising. Your algorithms do not understand me at all. So stop doing that, and just put up appealing advertising that has nothing whatever to do with the size of my body, the making of cupcakes in a crockpot, sex, or fathers virtue signaling their fatherhood by putting on make up to have tea with their young daughters. #fail
3. Don’t remind me to get back to you when I’ve been off for a few days. The whiny manipulative email just makes me hate you more. See number one.
4. Go back to prompting me just to wish someone a happy birthday. Stop burdening me with the weird “send good thoughts” and the creepy “help so and so make their day special”. I only have thirty seconds. I have time to wish someone a happy birthday. I don’t have extra Karmic energy hanging around to have the weight of a thousand birthdays resting on my thumbs.
5. Don’t mess with my feed. Let it be like the olden bygone days when stuff came up in order and I could scroll back through to find moments and people of interest. Trying to algorithmically second guess who and what you think I want or should want to see first only frustrates and angers me even more. And frustration doesn’t lead to sharing. #sorrybutitdoesnt
6. Perhaps consider, for a moment or two, that as dumb and dumber we the American public are, we are not so brick like that we can’t tell that you are trying to manipulate us into certain kinds of behavior, behavior we maybe don’t have time for because we do have other things to do. In a fractured modern world, where the people that one may have loved and invested in, now live nowhere nearby, where one has layers and layers of different kinds of relationships, where one also wants to know others and be known by them, you initially provided an interesting and valuable forum whereby connections between human beings, even meaningful connections, could be made. But, like a good restaurant that is delivering a delicious and pleasurable product, but then begins to panic about its bottom line, and not grant people the freedom to be who they are and order what they want, you have tried to mold the Modern Facebook user to suit you, rather than molding yourself to suit the Modern Facebook user. That’s bad business. And some of us have noticed and acted accordingly.
7. Instead of trying to get a certain kind of behavior, stop, Dear Facebook, and examine what is actually unfolding on your platform that is interesting and good. Sure, there is a lot less personal sharing, but there is a lot more conversation and dialogue. Aren’t we all about dialogue these days? As the friend count for each of us mounts up and up, as we may react to that larger number with more guarded sharing, we nevertheless have a greater sea of interesting people with whom we might converse, even about such outside articles as we have posted. Substantial conversations take place on Facebook. New genuine friends are discovered in the building of acquaintances. Sharp disagreements that unsettle both sides are carried through. Amusing jokes and beautiful pictures make their way from one feed to another, uniting all of humanity joke by joke, or at least the part of humanity that has been suckered in over the last ten years. There’s probably money still to be made here, Gentle Facebook, but you should calm down and look to see what is really happening. You shouldn’t try to control speech. You shouldn’t try to train content and sharing to suit yourselves. You should continue to serve a fractured world by providing a forum where connections are made, where thoughts and ideas are articulated and sharpened.

I’m here for you, Facebook. I’d be delighted to consult with your crack team of specialists. I think we both truly understand that you need me more than I need you.

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