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The Persuader
My personal blog, started in 2006. No paid or guest posts, no link sales.
Posts tagged ‘social media’
08.05.2022
Last nightâs hour-waster was chatting to Facebook Business Support. No, thatâs unfair. I was actually assigned an incredibly good rep who took me seriously, and concluded that Facebook did indeed have a bug which means, of all the pages I can manage, the one for Lucire is alone in not allowing me, or any of its admins, to do anything. How coincidental, after losing Instagram and Twitter for periods during 2021.
Ironically, one editor canâof course someone who is supposed to have fewer privileges can do more. Such is Facebook.
A few things I learned. Thereâs a Meta Business Suite, which a whole bunch of pages got shoved into, whether you wanted it or not. My public page is there, for instance. It seems if you have Facebook and Instagram accounts for the same thing, youâre going to be in there.
Despite the two-factor authentication discussed in the previous post, I actually can get into the Business Suite, via another page I administer for a friend. From there I can get to Lucireâs tools.

I donât need two-factor authentication for any of the other pages in there, including my own, and have full access.
Trisha, or Trish as she said I could call her, walked me through the steps, and asked me to get to the Suite page. Then she asked me to click âCreate adâ, and I get this:

She asked me to check the account quality, and of course there are no issues:


She wrote: âThanks for letting me know. It’s weird because I have checked all your assets here and it looks good. But, here’s what I suggest, Jack. We’ll need to report this to our Internal team so they can investigate. You might experience a bug or glitch.â
I theorized: âJust so you know, this page dates back to 2007 so maybe it is so old that Facebookâs servers canât handle it?â
It wasnât something she responded to, as she stayed on-subject, but itâs a theory worth entertaining, as it wouldnât be the first time Iâve witnessed this.
So, for now, the one team member who can still go on Facebook for us posted this at my request:

I doubt theyâll ever fix it, and two years ago I did say I wouldnât really bother if Facebook went buggy and prevented us from updating again. Clearly I am bothering, as I know we have readers who use Facebook. But I have very little faith this will ever be fixed, since I have seen other reported bugs (some covered on this blog) get ignored for years, and this isn’t a fleeting bug, from what I can make out.
The lesson, as I have probably hinted at more than once, is never rely on a Big Tech service. The sites are so unwieldy that they get to a point where no one knows how to fix them. If earlier experiences are any indication, such as what I experienced at Vox, we have arrived at the end of Facebook pages.
Tags: 2020s, 2022, bug, bugs, Facebook, Lucire, publishing, social media, social networking Posted in internet, publishing, technology | No Comments »
01.05.2022
Some of the articles in Lucire are still manually designed in Dreamweaver, and those need to be added to the social networks in a similar way. There we use Zoho Social to update things.
In practice, we only do Twitter, as IFTTT then takes care of reposting our updates to Facebook. Today, I noticed that IFTTT has failed to take any of our Tweets to Facebook since April 25, for no reason I can work out.

We also cannot use Zoho Social to make Facebook page updates, so the fault does not lie with these individual services, but Facebook itself.
First Zoho Social said I needed permission from the page admin to add images, but I am the page admin; then it said I could not post at all.


I went to Facebook for the first time in goodness knows how long to discover there is no way to enter a post manually there, either!

I tried using the Meta Business Tools, but I canât be authenticated, since they require you use an âappâ (none of which I have heard of), a physical security key (strange to me as I have no idea what one looks like or where it goes), or a cellphone (yeah right, like Iâm going to give Facebook that very personal detail for them to sell).

It looks like another massively stupid decision on Facebookâs part, so odds are weâll cease to update any of our Facebook pages going forward. It will take too much effort to figure out how to fix this. Even if we could type into Facebook, we don’t want to be feeding in every headline and link manually.
I ceased to have any respect for Facebook many years ago, but kept things going there for the sake of our readers. But if they are shutting down the pagesâcertainly all their functionality is disappearingâthen we will have no choice but to end our updates there.
PS.: If any of you are wondering, I am definitely the admin, but I can’t do any of the things Facebook says I can:

If I access the options under ‘Page Owner’, apparently I can report ourselves, but nothing more!

Looks I still can post to a page where I’m not the owner but a contributor, but I can’t post to one where I’m the owner and admin:

Remember how a page settings’ page usually looks?

Here’s Lucireâs:

The only options I have as admin are:

And before you ask, there are no page ‘violations’ other than one post from years ago, because US sites can’t handle artistic nudity where you can’t see anything inappropriate. Genocide and misinformation are fine, though.
I think what Facebook does is let you work on pages that aren’t yours(!)âit wouldn’t be the first timeâbut not your own! It really is this daft there.
Tags: 2022, bugs, Facebook, marketing, promotion, social media Posted in business, internet, marketing, publishing, technology, USA | 1 Comment »
24.04.2022

Not much of my old Drivetribe channel left now
Sadly, I was late to the demise of Drivetribeâthough as some on Reddit point out, the brand still exists on other channels. But as for hosting the content themselves, that ended in January, and we content creators had till then to get our stuff off.
I had been checking in there less and less over 2021, which is a real shame. It had been a favourite site of mineâcars, and like-minded fanaticsâbut I guess it takes a lot more than a community to make a community.
Maybe it was the people I followed, but I never really got the right mix of news and entertainment. Others might beg to differ. I had little desire to follow the foundersâClarkson, Hammond, May, and Wilman (sorry chaps, Iâve watched you all in one shape or another since the 1990s, and given Wilman’s nude appearances on Top Gear, they are not necessarily shapes I want in my head)âso it was down to other content creators and contributors.
Twitter gives me some joy because of various car accounts thereâAndrew at the Car Factoids and Andy with what must be a world-leading private brochure collectionâand contributing seems a breeze. Drivetribe was somewhat hampered with a less-than-easy-to-use interface and somewhere along the line, in its first year if I recall correctly, the typography changed for the worse (at least to my eyes).
And like so many social networks, it was about keeping the content there in the hope it would generate money for the core business. It did indeed have a separate programme for creators, where they expected to share in the loot, but ironically after I was approved to join, I lost interest in contributing. Maybe it was because I had my own sites that I could work on. Autocade eats up spare time with each model taking a good 15 minutes on average to illustrate, research and write.
Anything I wrote for Drivetribe exclusively, and there were a few pieces, is practically toast. There may be a few links on the Wayback Machine, but the rest is online history. Itâs hardly their fault: the closure was covered in automotive media extensively, although I never received any emails about it. Itâs a lesson once again to ensure that you keep copies of your own content; in my case, I might still have them in WordPerfect format on a DVD-ROM somewhere. Relevant ones appeared in Lucire and Lucire Men.
Speaking of hosting your own stuff, I wonder if this is what the future holds.
This comes at a time when another Tweeter I follow has lost his Instagram account for no reason he can fathom, and I shared with him that I wouldnât mind hosting my own photos on this very site. Instagram is a once-every-few-months network for me now, at least when it comes to posting on my personal account. (Iâll look at it more for Lucire.) If John is right, we could be looking at a separation again: those who can host their own will, and those who canât, rely on the mass services. There could be less interaction between groups of people, but then the social networks only have themselves to blame for fostering toxicity. We are only human: we found others to interact with and learn from in the early 2000s before Facebook and Twitter, and we can again. We might even find it more productive as we claw our time back from those services.
And if itâs about traffic, each post I make here gets multiples more views than most things Iâve posted to Instagram. Seven hundred is pretty normal. Is there any point, then? The negatives seem to outweigh the positives, and this becomes truer every day. Youâd be a mug to want to buy one of these services in 2022.
Tags: 2020s, 2022, car, Drivetribe, Instagram, social media, social networking, Twitter Posted in cars, internet, publishing, technology, UK | No Comments »
16.04.2022

Kristina Flour/Unsplash
This Twitter thread by Yishan Wong is one of the most interesting Iâve come across. Not because itâs about Elon Musk (who he begins with), but because itâs about the history of the web, censorship, and the reality of running a social platform.
Here are some highlights (emphases in the original):
There is this old culture of the internet, roughly Web 1.0 (late 90s) and early Web 2.0, pre-Facebook (pre-2005), that had a very strong free speech culture.
This free speech idea arose out of a culture of late-90s America where the main people who were interested in censorship were religious conservatives. In practical terms, this meant that they would try to ban porn (or other imagined moral degeneracy) on the internet âŠ
Many of the older tech leaders today ⊠grew up with that internet. To them, the internet represented freedom, a new frontier, a flowering of the human spirit, and a great optimism that technology could birth a new golden age of mankind.
Fast forward to the reality of the 2020s:
The internet is not a “frontier” where people can go “to be free,” it’s where the entire world is now, and every culture war is being fought on it.
It’s the main battlefield for our culture wars.
Yishan points out that left-wingers can point to where right-wingers get more freedom to say their piece, and that right-wingers can point to where left-wingers get more. âBoth sides think the platform is institutionally biased against them.â
The reality:
They would like you (the users) to stop squabbling over stupid shit and causing drama so that they can spend their time writing more features and not have to adjudicate your stupid little fights.
Thatâs all.
They don’t care about politics. They really don’t.
He concedes that people can be their worst selves online, and that the platforms struggle to keep things civil.
They have to pretend to enforce fairness. They have to adopt âprinciples.â
Let me tell you: There are no real principles. They are just trying to be fair because if they weren’t, everyone would yell louder and the problem would be worse âŠ
You really want to avoid censorship on social networks? Here is the solution:
Stop arguing. Play nice. The catch: everyone has to do it at once.
I guarantee you, if you do that, there will be no censorship of any topic on any social network.
Because it is not topics that are censored. It is behavior.
I think Yishanâs right to some degree. There are leanings that the leaders of these social networks have, and I think that can affect the overall decisions. But heâs also right that both left and right feel aggrieved. I warned as much when I wrote about social media and their decision about Donald Trump in the wake of the incidents of January 6, 2021. Iâve seen left- and right-wing accounts get taken down, and often for no discernible reason I can fathom.
Generally, however, civil discourse is a perfectly fine way to go, and for most things that doesnât invite censorship or account removal. Wouldnât it be nice if people took him up on this, to see what would happen?
Sadly, that could well be as idealistic as the ânew frontierâ which many of us who got into the dot com world in the 1990s believed in.
But maybe heâs woken up some folks. And with c. 50,000 followers, he has a darn sight better chance than I have reaching just over a tenth of that on Twitter, and the 1,000 or so of you who will read this blog post.
During the writing of this post, Vivaldi crashed again, when I attempted to enter form dataâa bug that they believed was fixed a few revisions ago. It appears not. I’ll still send over a bug report, but everything is pointing at my abandoning it in favour of Opera GX. Five years is a very good run for a browser.
Tags: 1990s, 2020s, 2022, censorship, culture, Facebook, freedom of expression, freedom of speech, history, internet, Reddit, social media, social networking, Twitter, USA, Web 2·0, World Wide Web, Yishan Wong Posted in culture, internet, politics, technology, USA | No Comments »
31.12.2021
Weâre probably far enough along from the event for people not to know which one I am referring to, as Iâve no wish to embarrass the organizers.
Earlier in 2021, we saw a weekend event that would take place at the âJohnsonville Community Hubâ. No address was given other than that. Both Duck Duck Go and Google seemed to think this meant Waitohi, the new library and swimming pool complex.
We arrived there to find that no one knew of this event, but maybe we could try the community hall next door?
No joy.
There was the Collective Community Hub on Johnsonville Road but their website made it clear that it wasnât open at the weekend.
We hung round Johnsonville for a bit and decided we would check out the Collective place, just to see it up close.
Sure enough, thatâs where the event wasâit was open at the weekendâand we got there after everyone had packed up.
They were very apologetic and we told them the above. They had noted, however, that there had been more information on Facebook.
To me, thatâs a big mistake, because I donât know what their Facebook page is, and even if I did, there was no guarantee I would see it for a variety of reasons. (Try loading any fan page on Facebook on mobile: the posts take unbearably long and few people would have the patience.) A search for the event on both Duck Duck Go and Google never showed a Facebook page, either.
A similar event posted its cancellation on Facebook exclusively, something which we didnât know till we got there, and after getting puzzled looks from the party that had booked the venue, I randomly found one organizerâs page and clicked on his Facebook link. Again, nothing about the event itself came up on Duck Duck Go or on Google.
In the latter case, the organizer had the skills to make a web page, a normal one, so was it so hard to put the cancellation there?
You just canât find things on Facebook. They donât appear to be indexed. And if they are, theyâre probably so far down the resultsâ pages that they wonât be seen. If youâre organizing an event, by all means, post there to those who use Facebook keenly (a much smaller number than you think, with engagement decreasing year after year), but it is no substitute for getting it into properly indexed event calendars or on to the web, where regular people will put in search terms and look for it.
Facebook is not the internet. Thank God.
Tags: 2021, Aotearoa, Duck Duck Go, event marketing, events, Facebook, Google, marketing, New Zealand, promotion, search engine, social media, Wellington, Whanganui-a-Tara Posted in business, internet, marketing, New Zealand, Wellington | No Comments »
22.12.2021
This was somewhat disappointing.
This chap contacts me, seemingly wanting permission to repost our Instagram images. His personal info has been removed.
Hello there,
We have reviewed your page and we truly loved your work!
Weâd like to repost your pictures on our profile. Our account is [redacted] and we have over 200.000 followers. If our followers see your work a large number of them are extremely likely to follow you.
I hope this sounds great to you since we are convinced you are going to receive a lot of new fans from this.
Would you like to be published on our page?
All the best,
I realize this was a form email but I thought: how courteous that they ask permission first. So many just steal your work. I felt they should be complimented on doing the right thing.
Dear [redacted]:
Thank you for reaching out but we must decline your offer. Our work is licensed for our use only, and we cannot permit it to be reposted. We truly appreciate your asking us first and for doing the right thing.
Kind regards,
Jack Yan
Publisher, Lucire
Seems their email system is set up assuming that all replies are positive, because I next get this:
I appreciate you getting back to us!
We have delivered many sponsored shoutouts and the results were always terrific. When we saw your Instagram profile we were confident you would get the same results. You can choose the photos for the promotion yourself or we can help you out with that.
We guarantee at least 500 new followers with just one picture. With 3 published photos you will get at least 1500 new followers, and with 7 – more than 3500 new followers! If we don’t deliver these results, we will issue a full refund.
Packages:
1 shoutout – $39
3 shoutouts – $79
7 shoutouts – $159
And it goes on.
This doesnât deserve much more than:
Dear [redacted]:
I don’t know if you read my reply at 11.31 a.m. UTCâit seems like you haven’t. It’s a no.
Regards,
Jack
And a block of the schmuckâs domain on our server, plus two reports from us on Instagram for spamming.
I know youâre thinking: why did you even bother replying in the first place?
Well, usually when people send me unsolicited emails, theyâre not so stupid as to not read the replies. This Instagram scammer, whose followers are probably all fake anyway, had automated everything, and took things to the next level of laziness. And heâs a greedy bugger as well, wanting to use your work and charge you for their using it!
This is a sure way to ruin your reputation, and if you feel public policy would be served by my revealing their identity, Iâm very happy to do so.
Tags: 2021, business, email, Instagram, scam, social media, technology Posted in business, internet, technology | No Comments »
21.12.2021
With Lucireâs Twitter restoredâit was a huge distraction over the last two months with various automatic posting gadgets needing to be reprogrammed, and the Twitter-to-Mastodon cross-poster still does not work (itâs what happens when you modify things that are working perfectly well: itâs impossible to put them back)âwe wanted to get some of our social media back up to speed.
So letâs get back to rubbishing Facebook, shall we?
Because whenever we post, whether itâs through another program or directly on Facebook, the post just does not show on the page itself, unless youâre on the ultra-slow mobile edition (m.facebook.com) where youâre likely to give up before the posts begin to load. You have to wait many hours, even a day, for something to appear on the full-fat web version.
This reminds me of those days when our Facebook walls stopped updating on the 1st of each month, presumably because someone in Menlo Park had to flip a switch to tell the website that the new month had begun. And they wouldn’t do it till it hit midnight in California since everyone on the planet must live in the one time zone.
Whatâs the bet itâs a related glitch that existed at the end of 2011 and the beginning of 2012, but we need to wait till midnight in California for Facebook to know it’s a new day?
Hereâs the mobile version (albeit viewed on the desktop) earlier on Tuesday:

And hereâs the web version, still unchanged 12 hours later, with the newest post after the pinned one from December 18.

Lesson: donât use Facebook if you wish to tell your audience something urgently. You are better off sending an email: theyâre more likely to see it in a timely fashion. And if your following isn’t that big, and you need your fans to know something urgently, it might actually be quicker to telephone them! Social mediaâforget it.
Tags: 2021, bug, Facebook, incompetence, marketing, social media, technology Posted in internet, marketing, technology | No Comments »
17.12.2021
I canât yet reveal why, but Iâve come across the work of Hong Kong-trained and based designer Caroline Li, and itâs really good. Sheâs done a lot of book covers, and I know first-hand how hard it is to have a small canvas to work from. Maybe Iâm just used to magazines. Check out her work here.

After nearly two months, Lucireâs Twitter account has been restored.
Earlier in the week, they had requestedâagainâthat I upload my ID to prove that I was who I said I was, despite this having been done countless times already in the past two months.
Today, I received another âit appears that this issue may have been resolved.â I had my doubts and was about to send them a reply giving them a piece of my mind, but I checked, and sure enough, Lucireâs account was back.
I donât know if my letter to Twitter New Zealand Ltd.âs directors, via their lawyers, did the trick, or whether my private information finally reached someone literate with reasonable intelligence.
I gave the lawyers till today (the 17th) to respond, though the timing of the resolution could be a coincidence.
It showed just how terrible Twitterâs systems have been and how right I was to call the entire process farcical.
To think that Facebook did better when Lucireâs Instagram was deactivated, and we were only out for a week. And I have had plenty to say about Facebook over the years, as you all know.
Itâs a shame that we never got to play with Zoho Socialâs premium version trial with all our social media accounts intact. I just hope that now that weâve reactivated all our gadgets (IFTTT, Dlvr.it, etc.), that they work as they once did. (As they certainly didnât when we used our temporary @luciremagazine account on Twitter.)
When I was waiting for my new phone to arrive, I didn’t know what all the DHL status updates meant. I looked online to see if I could get a clue as to how long each stage took, especially the “last mile” delivery. There were very few screenshots or public traces. Here’s the trace from my package in case it helps someone else the same boat. (Vivaldi put the DHL website header near the bottom when I made the screenshot.)

Tags: 2021, Aotearoa, designer, graphic designer, Hong Kong, law, Lucire, New Zealand, social media, technology, Twitter, UK, Zoho Posted in business, China, design, Hong Kong, internet, New Zealand, technology | 1 Comment »
03.12.2021

Pixabay
Twitter, after having done sweet F. A. about Lucireâs locked account, and failing to provide any response since the last lot of evidence was sent to them on the 4th ult., wrote this to me today:
After reviewing the reported account, it appears that this issue may have been resolved. Please reply to this email if you still need assistance, or to let us know if the situation has changed in any way.
You just have to wonder if they hire morons at that level, or do they hire regular people and train them down?
Dear Twitter Support:
This most certainly has not been resolved. Quite the opposite.
Your company still refuses to examine the evidence, despite our sending it numerous times.
We have heard nothing from you at all over the actions you say you will take. In fact, your latest response of pretending all is well is the only thing we have heard from Twitter since the 4th [ult.]
It has been referred to your internal support team by your UK head of planning, David Wilding (whom I know) to no avail.
I’m not sure that you could call it resolved as a quick check of the handle shows it ‘doesn’t exist’.
We ask again that @Lucire be unlocked as we have done nothing wrong, and we hold a USPTO trade mark registration for all online publishing usage. (Your own link in your autoresponse to locked accounts results in a 404.)
We have to come to your department as the “proper channels” for locked accounts claim that I cannot be confirmed as the owner of Lucire, and a USPTO certificate is apparently not the sort of evidence they will entertain.
Attached is a letter to your executives Winston Foo and John Pegg outlining the whole matter to date. It would be fair to label your responses farcical ⊠I have also attached the same items of evidence that have been sent earlier. They more than satisfy your requirements.
I should note that Instagram took a week to resolve an accidental deactivation caused by its AI, not a month and a half. This entire matter can sensibly be resolved in minutes, not months.
We put the ball back in your court.
Sincerely,
Jack Yan
The saga continues.
Tags: 2021, customer service, incompetence, intellectual property, Lucire, publishing, social media, Twitter Posted in business, internet, technology, USA | No Comments »
21.11.2021
Amazing what sort of press releases come in. I had no idea that Auckland is our capital, and I was surprised to find that Toronto and Antwerp are as well in the same release.
Essential Living is a British firm, from the looks of it, and no, we won’t be publishing this in Lucire.

You’d think the PR firm might check as well, but maybe post-Brexit they don’t really care about other countries any more?
Meanwhile, on Twitter. It’s getting nutty toward the end of the year. Just today we saw a motorcyclist come off his Suzuki in Johnsonville, and a Toyota van almost losing control altogether in Tawa. ‘Driving to the conditions’ doesn’t seem to be a thing any more. On Friday, it was this:
Usual story on Facebook. I had better report this fake account with a fake name!

Facebook says: it’s fine, nothing to see here.

Why do people continue to believe their user number claims? They’re rubbish.
Tags: 2021, Aotearoa, bot, Facebook, humour, JY&A Media, media, motoring, New Zealand, PR, social media, Twitter, UK, Wellington, Whanganui-a-Tara Posted in business, internet, media, New Zealand, technology, UK, USA, Wellington | No Comments »
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