You are currently browsing comments. If you would like to return to the full story, you can read the full entry here: “Being an optimist for a better post-Google, post-Facebook era”.
You are currently browsing comments. If you would like to return to the full story, you can read the full entry here: “Being an optimist for a better post-Google, post-Facebook era”.
I like your optimism (and how you retain it, even as you keep both eyes open and see the world as it is).
I think we need to get ideas like “too big to fail” out of our lexicon. Nothing should be allowed to get that big, or us to be that reliant on it.
This exercise in disentangling myself from Facebook is a good example, and it really is akin to smoking – I only stay because my friends are there. I could argue that I “need” to be there to sell books, but honestly, Facebook’s done nothing at all for me in that regard. Even my experiment in using “targeted ads” was a bust; the people they showed them to did not fit the demographic (they were, for the most part, its opposite).
I guess it’s like a Pandora’s box, Holly: there’s always hope.
Though I had read some of my earlier blog posts recently and I was harping on about the same thing—which means I’ve been hoping for this imagined future for over half a decade and we’ve only just extricated ourselves from Facebook. Maybe Mastodon or Hubzilla are the future; at least those weren’t around in 2010–11 so what we are talking about now is less theoretical.
Facebook has sent minimal traffic to our sites according to the referrer stats, so I don’t see much point to it commercially, either. I hate to say it but Google has been the primary source of random visitors. In one of our businesses we ran a Facebook campaign last week—and netted one bite.
Right now I’m keen to move on to other networks (social or otherwise) and meet new people. I was on Vox with hardly any friends in 2006, and now I count the people I found there as among my very closest.
We (not necessarily you and me, but the public in general) seem to have forgotten that pre-Facebook, we did venture to new sites, discover new communities, and establish new friendships. Facebook created too comfortable a community with old buddies within. We never advanced inside the comfort zone, even with our friend networks. The more we remember this, the less reliant we might become on Facebook.