Hello Facebook people.
TL;DR for the below. I’m leaving Facebook. Don’t take it personally.
All right. Now for the long version.
8 years ago I started a new Facebook account. It was meant to support the development and publication of a book. A marketing tool, if you like.
Well, the book is written and more or less out in the world. Over those years I’ve found Facebook to be a patchy marketing tool at best. In terms of spreading the world it’s good for a closed circle. If you as an account owner wants to add all and sundry to your friends list then it works better, but at the expense of exposing everything on your account to those people. There’s little control over the content you can limit. Yeah, there are pages, groups and so on and there is the ability to control notifications, but it’s patchy at best. Plus, the whole thing about that book has been a messy, soul-destroying nightmare from beginning to end and marketing isn’t going to resurrect the ashes of that project. “Daftworks” as a brand is a joke now.
Facebook is a social media platform. It’s not a marketing platform. Trying to make unsocial choices on a social platform is…daft (ha). I suppose the main thing I can’t get past is that deep down I’m antisocial. I’m picky about who I choose as “friends” and I have a very limited interest in certain aspects of even my best friends’ lives. I hate pictures of kids on social media. I am not keen on seeing or knowing what people had for breakfast or what they’re wearing today. I’m not bothered about where people are on holiday and I don’t really care where you were and what you were doing 7 years ago. And being honest I don’t really care about that stuff within my own family, so I don’t have much interest in anyone else’s business on a day to day basis.
OK, that all sounds really bad. Be clear on something. I value my friends. I really do. But when all it taken into account I’m a private person. I don’t like to share too much, because on some levels I feel people might keep that information and use it against me. I feel that if I let people in then it’s easy for people to turn on me. It’s happened more often than I want to admit, and so to be part of a social media circle is…confusing to me. Again, there are a small amount of people (less than 10) that I count as true friends, and I use more than Facebook to keep in touch with them. Someone told me long ago that you can only track so many people in your life and hold them dear, and that at some point that “inner circle” will completely change. That’s the nature of life. And being able to let go is key to being able to move forward in your own life.
So. Back up a bit – this was meant to be a marketing account for Facebook allowing me to do some publicity for “that bloody book”. So what with the personal crap, Dave? Yeah, things kinda slipped. I let it expand out. I tried to reel it back in with the friends and family group, but again with the limitations. And to be frank I never have been able to keep up with any online presence crap. I can’t blog, I can’t twitter, I can’t Facebook. So, why bother?
This was all going through my head months ago. So why now? Well, one of those real friends I talked about pointed out some dodgy dealings with some of the Facebook privacy policies – the upcoming WhatsApp one in particular looking like it was strongarming users into agreeing to share ALL of their shared information with Facebook, and that Facebook could then do what it liked with that data. Pictures, posts, contacts. Everything. At first I was sceptical then I looked into it and it did seem a bit dodgy. Apparently FB/WA have suspended that move to “make things a bit clearer” but still, the last nail has been hammered down into the coffin. I’m not happy taking even a little bit of risk that I one day accedintally agree to thos CONSTANT requests to add my phone list to WhatsApp or Messenger then WHOA all my contacts are shared to a third party. Nope.
So that’s it. I’m not ragequitting, I’m not pissed at anyone, or ranting at the world. I’m not singling anyone out. I’m just a paranoid, over-opinionated, antisocial failure at everything who is backing out of something that he has never been very good at anyway. Yeah, ok that last bit was a little self-indulgent. Hey, I had to give the trolls SOMETHING to bite at 😉
This means that the “Daftworks”, “Elite Dangerous Streamer Collective” and the “Dave Hughes Family and Friends” groups will also be closed down. I will try and re-allocate ownership of the Butteflies ADHD group to someone else.
Anyone who cares knows what my email address and website are, so keep an eye on those (especially the website) cos I might start putting some stuff on there.
Laters.