My Embattled Journey On Facebook

My debut on Facebook came 11 years ago, in 2007.

On the one hand, it doesn’t seem like it was that long ago largely because time seems to fly by now and 2007 in itself doesn’t seem like it was so long ago.  On the other hand, I sometimes find myself so disenchanted and burned out in regards to using Facebook that it absolutely does seem like it’s been that long. Much longer, even.

I initially resisted Facebook. Back in the infancy of social media, MySpace was my jam. The two sites battled for market and traffic supremacy every year up until Facebook finally surpassed MySpace permanently in 2008. I was on Team MySpace largely due to their capabilities to personalize everything along with their connections to the music industry that allowed me to discover all kinds of new bands. Their failure to keep up with the product development of their competitors became their downfall. By 2010 the MySpace website and network had essentially become obsolete which caused millions of users to cease using the platform. They were forced to layoff a massive amount of their workforce just to stay afloat, which only caused them to fall further behind. In 2011, MySpace officially waived the white flag and were sold off. It has since been re-purposed into an unrecognizable shell of its former self, serving as a site that attempts to boost the visibility of up and coming young pop artists in the entertainment industry.

When MySpace came crashing down, I finally defected to creating a profile and using Facebook as my main preference for social media connections. At the time, it was really the only other viable option. In 2007, it was still in the process of branching out from being primarily an online college yearbook to allowing anybody over the age of 13 to begin joining the site. The user rate has continued to climb ever since, allowing the platform to continue adapting over the years into the 2 billion user monstrosity it is at the current time.

My only purpose with Facebook in the very beginning was to stay connected to family and friends. It didn’t have any of the features with music and personalized pages that I enjoyed about MySpace. Quite frankly, I found Facebook pretty boring and didn’t really get on it all that much in the first few years. Around 2011, smart phones were starting to become the new norm and with it the use of mobile apps. It was when I got my first smart phone and downloaded the then still fairly new Facebook app that the platform shifted into being a daily part of my life. I always get a pretty good glimpse of this by looking through the “On This Day” feature which displays anything you might have posted on that same day in any given year dating back to when you first started your account. All my posts dated 2011 or older are largely all basic text posts and are much more scattered. My posts dated 2012 or later are much more frequent and more modern looking with pictures beginning to show up in them for the first time.

I took more and more of a liking to Facebook up until about 2016. I still largely just used it to stay connected to people, but over the years the development began advancing to where you could do other things. The addition of the Feed, business pages, “Like” pages, events, the share button, and all kinds of other stuff allowed me to finally start being able to follow music and other interests that I used to like doing on Myspace. I didn’t miss Myspace anymore. In fact, it now seemed almost ridiculous that I had actually once preferred it over Facebook.

MLM’s Change The Game

The biggest transition in terms of how I used and viewed Facebook, and social media as a whole, really started at the tail end of 2015 and then into 2016. I was talked into joining Team Beachbody, an MLM company, in November of 2015. I won’t rehash that whole story in this post, as I already wrote it about here: From Passion To Disdain: Why I Walked Away From Team Beachbody. Check it out if you missed it. But I will tell you how it effected my social media use.

MLM’s use Facebook and other social media sites to promote their products and lifestyles in an attempt to get their distributors to sign up other people in which they are connected to join in the scheme. In fact, it’s their biggest weapon. When I signed up with Team Beachbody, my upline basically told me that I needed to go in and “scrub” my Facebook page. Since I was going to be pushing myself as a fitness guru and promoter of Beachbody, I needed to essentially remove anything that might contradict that or make me look bad in the eyes of others. So I took a lot of time and deleted a bunch of old posts. I deleted nearly all the pictures of my college days and the few years after which displayed my drinking and hard partying days in any capacity. Then I started “liking”, friending, and following other Beachbody coaches, trainers, and fitness sites in an effort to push myself as a coach that was running “my own business.”

All of my posts going forward were then supposed to be strategic. I was taught that I had to post on Facebook no less than 3 times a day in order to maintain an acceptable level of visibility. I would usually post something motivational in the morning. A quote or a picture along with my own personal inspirational message attached to it. In the afternoon, I would post something more upbeat and exciting or push something that portrayed me as being an expert in the field. Then in the evening, I would ALWAYS put up a post-workout selfie with some insanely hyped up dialogue to go with it.

The entire goal behind maintaining this level of visibility was to engage people. The more “Likes” and comments you got on a post, the better it was, and the more visible it became. We then used that engagement to start one on one conversations with people to try to persuade them into the Team Beachbody realm.

Team Beachbody also utilized Facebook for it’s “Groups” function. We would start private groups for all kinds of reasons. We had one for just the coach team so that we could interact with each other out of the public view. We held “free” groups that would last a week in order to offer information on either coaching or a specific product. The biggest ones were the accountability groups that generally lasted 30 days or so in which anybody that signed up to complete a program could post daily updates on their progress and get tips and motivation from the coaches. I couldn’t even keep all my Facebook groups straight because I was in so many of them at any given time. It was truly exhausting.

This was my Facebook life for two years. I was a posting machine. I never put anything else on my page unless I went on a trip or to a concert or some other event and took pictures. I had gone from simply being somebody who wanted to use social media to stay in touch with friends and family, to a maniac who was constantly fishing for “likes”, comments, and connections to sign up my next down-line client. I was made to believe that I had learned valuable tools in terms of how to professionally manage and use social media to effectively run a business. In all actuality, all it did was install toxic, unhealthy, and addictive online behavior that I am now completely ashamed of. It has been a struggle to try to break myself free of those habits ever since I quit being a TBB coach.

If you read my blog about my experience with Team Beachbody, then you know I eventually came to realize that MLM’s were scams and that I had gotten taken for thousands of dollars in the two years I was a coach. I angrily quit and then had to make a significant effort in order to distance myself from that world.

This was the first time that I began to view Facebook in more of a negative light. I stopped being a coach in the summer of 2016. I was so exhaustively tired of being glued to Facebook all the time in the name of TBB that I deactivated my account entirely for almost 3 months. Didn’t touch it. It’s the only way I could think of to successfully combat the urges for me to pick my phone up and check the thing every 30 seconds. It felt amazing. Like a weight had been lifted off me. I began to go back to seeing things the way I used to.

When I finally reactivated my account I couldn’t stand seeing the Beachbody people in my feed any longer, so over time I unfriended most of them. Notably, it has also led me to have growing disdain for pretty much any posts by an MLM distributor for any company. I can sniff them out in a second. I would never “unfriend” anybody I know personally because of it, but I will tell you this. If you are reading this and happen to be a distributor for an MLM company, any MLM company, and you use social media on the regular to push your cause…..the probability is extremely high that I have unfollowed you so that your posts don’t show up in my feed. It’s nothing personal, as I’m sure people probably did that to me, too. I’m just being honest.

Back To Normal….But New Doubts Surface

It took me a considerable amount of time to “cleanse” my Facebook of all the MLM garbage from Team Beachbody that had clogged it all up. I found it slightly ironic that they had told me that I needed to “scrub” my page in order to present myself as a legitimate distributor, but then I had to turn around and do it all over again in order to shed their presence from my profile….and my life. I actually considered abandoning my FB page altogether and just washing my hands of it. Maybe create a new one completely from scratch. But I also didn’t want to risk losing touch with anybody, so I took another route.

With my profile now a couple of hundred “online” friends lighter, and any shed of MLM associations completely gone, I went back to being a normal Facebook citizen. But apparently I had been so preoccupied with what I had been doing before, that I hadn’t so much as noticed all the other issues that were becoming regular detriments to the platform.

I really just wanted to go back to using Facebook to simply stay connected to friends, family, and interests. As I increasingly scrolled through the feed, though, I realized that wasn’t what was happening. An extremely small percentage of things I saw posted were actual statuses, pictures, updates, or other things that seemed relevant.

No. Instead, all I seemed to be seeing was…..

• A slew of oddball shared things from other pages.
• Random videos, memes, and other non-original content.
• People ranting and raving about political topics. (Mostly gun control).
• A boat load of advertisements for shit I’ll never buy.
• Vague whining and complaining about every little thing.
• Fake News. Donald Trump. More Fake News. More Donald Trump.
• A whole lot of people NOT playing nice with each other.

Good grief, Facebook had a become a melting pot of toxic sludge!!! Algorithms were poisoning us all. It was completely insufferable. Only about 1 out of every 10/15 posts was something worthwhile. It got to the point where I just stopped even scrolling through the feed anymore. I would still occasionally post something on my own accord and then if people interacted with me at all, I would respond. Everything else just seemed to be a complete time waste.

I found myself thinking way back to the mid-2000s again. How social media used to be a fun way to interact with your friends and family. Maybe follow some bands or other fun things. I still wanted it to be like that. It is absolutely something else entirely now, though.  I’m not sure it’s even possible for social media to go back to the way it was. At some point in time Facebook got too big for itself. It has managed to somehow link itself in and latch itself on to everything on the planet. “Viral” is a common everyday term now. It’s like a wildfire of nonsense is always spreading across the platform and you can’t even avoid it.

I have always been a simple man at heart. I always will be. Complications cause messes. Facebook had become a huge, gigantic, complicated, mess of nonsensical information and propaganda. I disliked it more and more by the day, and largely started avoiding it. Facebook had lost me.

Hanging On and Changing The Mold

I had grown to almost loathe Facebook. I went another several months and wasn’t very active on it. Instagram has since become my favorite social media platform, although in a strange twist of irony Facebook now owns Instagram, because of course they do. The algorithms have slowly crept their way into Instagram, as ads have now found their way in. However, IG still mostly just remains fun pictures. People are much more adept to simply posting fun life happenings on there. The drama that clouds Facebook is mostly non-existent on the Instagram platform. Hopefully, it stays that way.

I’ve never been a Twitter user. I have an account, but I don’t think I’ve tweeted anything in about 3 years. Maybe longer. Trying to keep up with the Twitter feed is a hopeless cause, so I don’t even bother.

I tried Snapchat for a short time. I honestly don’t understand the point of it, though. The premise is fairly ridiculous. The app isn’t very user friendly and drains your phone battery.  And honestly, I have better things to do than to walk around “snapping” all the happenings of my every day. Long story short, after a few months of experimenting I quickly abandoned Snapchat.

Even though I had grown distraught with Facebook, I still thought I might be able to find a way to make it more tolerable. I still wanted to use it, because there are still a lot of features that I enjoy about it. I just hate that it has gotten infected with a bunch of toxic interference.

In the last few months, I figured I’d give one more go at trying to recreate my Facebook experience into something that I can utilize in a more constructive manner. As previously stated, I would never unfriend somebody I know personally for really any reason. But if you happen to be somebody who is a repeat offender of doing nothing but sharing nonsensical time wasting posts, or political propaganda, or really any of the things that I listed above….then I’ve probably unfollowed you.

I also realized that a lot of garbage I was seeing wasn’t even coming from people on my friends list. It was coming from “Like” pages I had followed. It’s amazing how quickly those can pile up. I had like 750 pages that I was following and didn’t even realize it. I knew that if I trimmed that way down that would probably serve to funnel out a good amount of feeder noise. I cut it almost in half. I now mostly only follow legitimate news sources, sports entities, and some band pages.

The weeding out process has helped significantly. While it’s impossible to avoid all of the things I can’t stand on there, I’ve at least personalized and narrowed it down as much as I can to finally make it somewhat enjoyable to follow people again.

As for my own FB posting habits, I don’t really do a ton of it anymore. I take after my mother and really enjoy phenomenal journalism pieces. REAL investigative journalism, not fake news. So I’ll share some great articles from time to time. And I’ll, of course, share my own writings. Outside of that, it’ll probably just be sports, music, and fun pictures….whenever I get the random urge.

I’ll be honest. I still don’t spend much time actually scrolling through the feed. So apologies if I miss a lot of your posts. It’s now more of a product of the habits I mentioned earlier in the blog. I’ve recently been making a big effort to simply not be on my cell phone as much through the day. To be more conscious and in the moments actually happening around me, instead of things happening in a small electronic screen. I’m really enjoying it, and it’s keeping me humble.

Social media can still be a great tool, if used properly. Tragically, there has just been so much negativity, toxic content, and addictive behavior pumped into it that it’s starting to spoil the whole idea of why it was created in the first place. If you happen to find yourself in a situation like mine, the only real advice I can offer is to tell you to take it upon yourself to make the experience a better one. Facebook clearly isn’t going to do it for you.

Clean it up. Unfollow/weed out as many of the toxic offenders as you can. Only follow pages that you have a real legitimate interest in keeping track of and get rid of the rest.

Apply the old fabled KISS principle – Keep It Simple, Stupid.

And for crying out loud, be nice to each other!!!

Thanks for stopping by!!