When Facebook Falls Out of Like With Your Blog

Sorry Facebook, it’s not me baby, it’s you.

Lots of people have fallen out of like with Facebook over the years, but when it’s the other way around, it stings a little.

So, Facebook, I’m starting to fall out of like with you – fast falling out of like with you actually – because you’ve fallen out of like with me.

Or more to the point, you’ve fallen out of like with my blog.  You’ve gone all silent on me.  Don’t even talk about me to anyone anymore. It’s as if you’re ashamed of me.

And I feel proper stupid.  There I was at stephenmcalpine.com, thinking of dumping you cos you’re not doing it for me anymore, and you dump me first!  That’s just rude that is.  I can’t be dumped, cos you’re dumped!

Look Facebook, I’m no conspiracy theorist.  Men did land on the moon in 1969.  JFK was shot by a gimlet-eyed Lee Harvey Oswald in 1963, and the Twin Towers were taken down by jet airliners.

Hey I even believe that line in the movie about your creator Mark Z, in which he slaps down those impossibly handsome Winklevoss twins with the line: “If you’d been the inventors of Facebook, you’d have invented Facebook.”

I wish I’d said that cos then, you know like, I’d be the inventor of Facebook.

And here’s what it looks like to me, and to a bunch of other Christian bloggers I know who write about the same sorts of things I do.  You know the sort of stuff.  The kind of stuff Facebookland workers don’t usually like cos it doesn’t suit their rather more liberal and secular agenda.

It looks like you are somehow absolutely skinning us through some crazy algorithm thing: something that weeds out our topics and ensures they die a quiet death with minimum fuss.

And my blogging friends say their Facebook stats have fallen through the floor this year and wondered if mine had too. And guess what?, they have.

I went back through the months and there wasn’t a steady decline, just a huge drop off at the start of the year, exactly the same time my blogging mates experienced the same thing.

And then one of those Christian blogger mates wrote a post about this very issue, naming it for what it was, and got exactly ten reads of it on Facebook.  I mean, couldn’t you even pretend you’re not cheating on us?  Make an effort at least!

So then I started asking around to see if people who read it regularly were seeing any posts in their feed cos no one was really liking it or sharing it all that much. And guess what?, they weren’t!

Of course the other thing to consider is that I have suddenly become a rubbish writer and that nothing I am writing, that was of considerable interest to people before, is of any interest to them now.  And maybe they just don’t want to tell me cos they’ll hurt my feelings.

And of course it could just be that a generic algorithm change has done this and it’s all totally innocent.  It could be just the way things are. I could have the wrong end of the stick.

You needed to work late every Thursday cos the boss said so.  You had to do that weekend trip for a conference.  Your credit card account was hacked by someone who bought pearl earrings and a lobster dinner.  It could all be perfectly plausible.

But I don’t think so.  Besides even if that is what you swear is true, when you come in late at night smelling of Russian vodka, I no longer trust what you say!  And when trust goes, it’s all over eh?

I guess a time was when to even say what I just said above would be considered particularly conspiratorial. Crazy even.

But then again there was probably a time when we all thought that Facebook was this beautiful utopian ideal that would connect us all and show us how much we liked cats and food.

That was the time before we found out how you used the information you have on us and how you would on-sell it, or fail to protect it, or let all sorts of dodgy groups use it to help win elections.

That was the time before we realised that you deliberately hold back certain types of information and release others.  That was the time before we realised that you didn’t view the world as one big happy university campus where we could connect with our friends, like in the sepia-toned beginning.

I guess I could always write about stuff you’d like a bit more and see if that helps, but all of the therapists say we shouldn’t change to suit of the agenda an ex-liker.

I need to be me Facebook, and to be honest I don’t think you’re capable of change anyway.

So this like story could be coming to an end.

So if you’re reading this blog post after finding it on Facebook, then congratulations; you are one of a shrinking number, and you have made some effort to find it.

Or it could be pure luck.  But with that level of luck, you should probably be running down to Ascot as I write, and putting a tenner of Sad Ken for a win at the 8pm.

So if anyone does read my blog on a regular basis, and you haven’t done so, then why not sign up on the blog itself to get the email update when it comes out, cos I think me and you Facebook might be taking some time out from each other for a while.

You know, just to see if there’s any future for the kind of like we used to have.