Tag Archives: Facebook

The Facebook page I can’t kill

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This is NOT a “pity me” post. Poor baby! He’s got a Facebook page that’s so popular he wants to kill it but can’t!

Well, I guess it is a “pity me” post.

My longtime co-author Douglas Walker and I wrote the first of our true crime books, WICKED MUNCIE, for the History Press in 2015 and the book was published in 2016. It did well enough that History Press wanted us to keep writing the books and we complied through our fourth, COLD CASE MUNCIE, published in 2023.

My favorite of the four books is THE WESTSIDE PARK MURDERS, about the most famous unsolved murders in our area, in and around Muncie, Indiana, published in 2021. A pandemic publication, it has done well despite – or because of? – we didn’t get to do our usual talks and signings.

Even before we were unable to talk to people in person because of the pandemic, four years before, in fact, I created a Facebook page named after WICKED MUNCIE, the first book. Over the years since 2016, I populated the page – sometimes on a hit and miss basis – with anecdotes about the four books and their making, plus I told stories that were not included in any of the books.

This year, 10 years after I created it, the WICKED MUNCIE Facebook page is still going strong, adding new followers every day. I haven’t posted much true crime content in a while – hmm maybe people prefer a page that doesn’t have a lot of new content from the likes of me – and now tops 3,600 Facebook followers. Undoubtedly some of those are bots and now-inactive accounts, but it’s a lot of eyeballs to just casually turn away from. Until just recently, it was my largest social media presence. That’s no longer the case as just this week, my Bluesky account reached more than 3,800 followers. That’s about the same number as follow my Twitter account, although I really suspect many of the “people” on that hellsite are not actually people.

So with 3,600 followers on the WICKED MUNCIE page, I don’t feel like I can shutter it or even walk away and neglect it. So I’m cross-posting some of the same stuff I post on my other socials. And of course there’ll be some true crime stuff occasionally. Not as much as in the past, though.

So yes, there’s a word for someone who won’t walk away from a platform that affords them thousands of followers. Several words, really.

It’s like that old joke with the punchline, “We’ve already established what you are. Now we’re just haggling over the price.”

Facebook is the worst. And yeah, I’m still on it.

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The photo above appeared on the Facebook history page for my hometown and hundreds of people are commenting on it. The building in question was the headquarters of a long-gone local dairy operation that was a beloved part of the community. In the comments, people are mourning the loss of the building and, long before that, the dairy business, and they’re citing their favorite products.

Only one problem: As some of the comments point out, this photo is more than 10 years old. The building was torn down more than 10 years ago. Because it’s not a great picture, it’s hard to tell that this demolition, more than a decade ago, left a prominent part of the complex standing. And it’s still there this morning.

The caption reads only, “Demo of Riggins Dairy.” That’s it. It doesn’t note that the demo took place 11 years ago. That’s left up to a commenter.

There are soooo many problems with Facebook. (And yes, I’m still on there, because it’s a way to communicate with friends and family and promote my work and that of others.) The worst is that the parent company, Meta, actively supports the destruction of our democratic society.

But another huge problem is misinformation and, charitably, half-assed information. I suppose the original poster didn’t intend to mislead people – including many, many people who follow the page who haven’t been in the city in 10, 20, 30 or 50 years – into thinking the demo was actively going on today. It’s hard to say.

But even by omitting information and context, even if innocently intended, it’s given the impression that “they’re tearing down the old dairy building.” I thought that myself because I haven’t lived there in going on four years. Then I saw the comments giving some trimeframe context.

I can’t tell you to boycott Facebook because I’ve got three pages – my personal page, which has very limited access by readers, and my author page and Wicked Muncie page, created in 2016 to promote our true crime books.

But for pete’s sake, be aware that you’re not getting the whole story when you see something on Facebook. Sometimes all that means is that you’re misinformed about a building. Sometimes it means you’re misinformed about assaults on our democracy.

Jumping into the discourse about Bluesky

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If you’ve been paying attention, you’ve seen people argue that the social media platform Bluesky is a failure. It has “only” 36 million-plus users, compared to more than 600 million twitter users. (The latter is a number I think is highly suspect, but that’s a topic for another day.)

I joined Bluesky more than a year ago, I think, but I didn’t spend a lot of time on the social media site until last fall, when some odious thing the owner of twitter had done drove other people there. All of a sudden, Bluesky seemed populated – much more so than in the first few months after I had joined – and much livelier.

So-called “Starter Packs” on Bluesky – curated lists of writers, engineers, performers, artists, whatever – gave my follower count a boost early on, but the growth in the number of followers there has been pretty consistent. I have about 2,800 followers there now, compared to more than 4,000 at my peak on twitter. That Bluesky following was built in a matter of months, by the way, compared to all the years since 2009 I’ve been on twitter.

(I still have a twitter account, to keep in touch with friends who are still more active there than on Bluesky, but I spend much, much more time on Bluesky.) I’m also active on Facebook, where I started an author page this year despite my misgivings over the attitudes and behavior of the suck-up American oligarch who owns it, and I post regularly there and on Instagram (same owner, same dislike for the owner). The reason I’m still on all those platforms is, besides keeping up with friends who are on them, is to publicize my book, THAT OCTOBER.

But I spend most of my time on Bluesky, regardless of follower numbers and engagement, because it just feels like the least awful place on socials. I’m not choosing the lesser of evils here, I promise. I feel like using any social media is like building a new house (ie active thread that’s hopefully engaging) on somebody else’s property.

In other words, all of social media is someone else’s real estate. When they want to take it away from us, they can.

That’s also why Bluesky is the least reprehensible social platform. The owners of twitter and Facebook and other Meta platforms have shown themselves to be dishonest in how they treat the people who actively bring eyeballs to those platforms. They take the value of our work and bluster and censure us.

BlueSky seems the least likely social media platform to do this.

This might change if the semi-collective, not-especially-concentrated ownership of Bluesky changes, perhaps through a sale at some point in the future. Money talks and bullshit walks and aside from political ideology, there’s been no more certain death knell for various socials than how much their owners can make by selling them or just selling out.

So I’m spending time on Bluesky – too much time, probably – and little time anywhere else, although I have a presence everywhere. This site is a pretty reliable place to find my latest thoughts but it is not a two-way street, unlike even the worst social.

So I don’t think Bluesky is dying. I do think it is, right at this moment, a less reprehensible (there’s that phrase again) place than the alternatives.

We’ll see if that continues to be the case.

Once you’ve had Facebook, you’ll never go back

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In watching the reaction to the new Facebook today — reaction that ranged from irritation to outrage — I was reminded of David Letterman’s straight-faced observation about pop star Madonna back in the 1980s. “I think she wants to shock us,” Letterman said, tongue in cheek.

Earlier today I compared FB to a significant other who flirts or picks a fight just to make sure we’re still paying attention and not taking them for granted.

Sure, there’s some legitimate reason for upgrading and offering your users the latest and best features. But I think FB wants to remind its bazillion users how much it means to us.

Even if that means pissing us off.

As someone who has been in the communications business since I was a teenager, I can testify to the feeling engendered by reader reaction. No matter if it’s a complaint about a controversial story or photo or, even worse, the removal of a beloved comic strip, the response is appreciated. It means people are paying attention, that you’re still part of their everyday lives.

Face it, most of us might never take up Twitter (although you should, because it’s really fun) or Google+ (yawn). But for those bazillion of us who check in to FB every day — even if our devotion is far more casual than “checking in” via Foursquare or more low key than posting our latest rant about an irritating co-worker or prodigious child — we’ll keep checking in, no matter how many times we threaten to quit FB.

And no silly revamping of the way our pages look will keep us away.

Now, let me tell you what I don’t like about the new Facebook …