Tag: YouTube

The absolute trash fire that is Facebook

I remember first hearing about Facebook. I was in secondary school at the time. I think at that time it was still exclusive – you could only create an account if you were at a certain educational institution.

Making it exclusive in that way certainly worked to make the site enticing. When finally we could create accounts, me and everyone I knew did so. We’d all already had accounts on Bebo and MySpace, of course – a story almost every millennial will tell you – but that’d never really gone anywhere.

Facebook was so different in the early years. It seems bizarre, looking back to 2009-2010, that it did mostly consist of talking – in a very indirect way – with your friends – that was mostly who and what you saw on there. And it was such a simple website too. (At least, that’s how I remember it. I think there were groups and direct messages at the time, but for the most part what you saw when you went to the site was your ‘wall’.)

Having a Facebook account wasn’t an essential part of life at the time, but nor was it an irritant.

Jump forwards in time to now. My goodness is Facebook an absolute trash fire now. The site is barely useable. I mean that in two senses – firstly in the sense that the site breaks – A LOT – and secondly in the sense that the site is filled with a blistering concoction of useless, unrelated, and inconvenient features.

I mean, let me go to the main page (I can’t remember what they’re calling it nowadays – the ‘news feed’? – I don’t know). I am immediately presented with about a thousand different things, absolutely none of which I want. The first thing I see is a post from a page that I don’t follow and have never followed and which none of my friends are following. The reason I don’t follow it is because I’m not interested in it and this post is shit. This post is the most generic piece of ‘content’ I’ve ever seen – derivative, banal – it’s not even formatted correctly. Why are you pushing this shit, Facebook?

I scroll down, and the next thing I see is – oh – another post from a page I don’t follow – no, wait – it’s from a group I’m not in. For some reason Facebook has both ‘pages’ and ‘groups’, even though they seem to do the exact same fucking things. This utterly demented post is showing me what is quite obviously an American McMansion, but describing it as some kind of architectural gem. What the fuck is this, Facebook? Is this rage-bait? Are you showing this to people because you know they’ll comment about how ugly the house is? Why are you even showing me this in the first place – neither I nor any of my friends are in this Facebook group, and I have never shown any interest in being in this group.

I scroll down again. What’s next? Oh, it’s some shorts videos. Fantastic, Facebook – because I haven’t been bombarded with those enough from every other website. One of the videos is about cutting a fish. Look, one of those is interesting, Facebook – two is excessive. Another seems to be about making boiled sweets. Again, Facebook, one is interesting, two is excessive.

The next item? Another post from a page I don’t follow. The one after that? An advert from a clothing brand. And it goes on, and on, and on. More posts from things I don’t follow; more shorts videos (or whatever stupid name they call them on Facebook); more covert adverts.

And what if I divert my gaze away from the endless diarrhœa? On the left there is a list of … things? ‘Memories’ is one of them. I’ve never clicked that. I don’t need to, Facebook, I have memories in my head. ‘Saved’ – I’ve never clicked that, either – I don’t think I’ve ever ‘saved’ anything on here. ‘Video’ – what even is that? All video? Or just short videos? If I want videos, Facebook, I’ll go to YouTube. Obviously. ‘Feeds’ – isn’t that what I’m already on, Facebook? If I click on ‘See More’, the list becomes even more bewildering. ‘Climate Science Centre’ – why the fuck does Facebook have a ‘Climate Science Centre’? What even is that? ‘Meta Quest 3S’ – I don’t know what that is, Facebook – why is it there? ‘Ray-Ban Meta’. What?! I just – I don’t even know what I’m looking at, and why is any of this stuff here? Why is any of this stuff considered to be important enough to have on the main page?

Below all of that is a list of ‘shortcuts’ – possibly the only useful thing on the page. On the opposite side is a list of ‘contacts’ – don’t you mean my actual friends, Facebook? Or have we given up on that word? It would be nice if the list were ordered in a way that wasn’t entirely random. There’s also a message button in the top right – with a lightning bolt through it. It’s not entirely clear how this is different from the list of contacts – they seem to do the same things.

That’s just the main page. The experience of it is like pouring battery acid in my eyes and then going on a guided tour of the Museum of Fresh Turds – with a tactile exhibit. What is any of this for, Facebook? Why would I want any of this? WHO is it for?! Is anyone actually using this?

You might be wondering, at this point, why I still have a Facebook account if I hate the site so much. I suppose it’s just out of the belief that, if I delete my account, it would be easier for a scammer to impersonate me on the site. I mean, that’s it – that’s why. How low Facebook has fallen for that to be the only reason left to keep an account on there open.

Sometimes I think that another reason to keep it open is so that I can contact old friends on there should I need to. But actually I think most of my friends on there have long since stopped using Facebook altogether.

(I also keep my Facebook account so that I can promote various things I do – books and videos and the like – on there. But I’ve never been very good at this – in large part because the site is so ungainly to use.)

I won’t go through every page of the website and examine all the ways in which it is shit – suffice to say that every other page of the site is filled with problems too. Over the years, I’ve tried using Facebook ads for various things. I have never persisted with them for very long – in large part because the ads manager system was just completely broken – I honestly don’t know how anyone used it. Pages would fail to load; links would lead in loops; nothing was where you’d expect it to be. This was a few years ago, but I honestly don’t know how Facebook has ever managed to make any money with such a broken ads platform.

I think that Facebook has suffered from a problem that many technology companies suffer from after a time. You see, everyone who works at a technology company wants to put their mark on the technology they create. They want to have their feature – the thing that they added – it was their idea or they implemented it. It’s a status thing – they can forever boast about how they were the person who added that thing to the technology. The result is, over time, such pieces of technology inflate with features that are not useful or necessary. Facebook reeks of this. Elon Musk takes plenty of flak for wanting to make Twitter some kind of ‘everything app’, but Facebook has already been trying to do this for years, it seems.

Oh you know what, to finish, I’ll roast another part of the site. Managing a Facebook page is an absolute fucking nightmare. Every time I try to do anything for my ‘Benjamin T. Milnes’ page on Facebook, I just give up. I am just presented with a bewildering selection of crap that I don’t want.

When I go to my page, I’m asked a question: ‘How healthy is your Page?’. I don’t care Facebook. Not least because one of the options in this box is to ‘Link your WhatsApp account’. Are you insane, Facebook? Why would I want to do that?!

There’s a link that will take me to my ‘Professional dashboard’, whatever that is. Let’s see. Ah, here’s a new page – never seen this one before (clearly the masterpiece of another demented ‘product manager’ at Facebook). The first box has the heading ‘Weekly challenges’. No other information is presented with it – just a progress bar saying ‘0%’. Fucking marvellous, Facebook.

On the left there are some options. Apparently there’s an ‘Inspiration hub’ – whatever the fuck that is. I can ‘Earn achievements for creating reels’. Oh really, Facebook? What are these ‘achievements’ you speak of? Unless it’s money, I don’t really give a shit. Under ‘Tools to try’, I can click ‘Stars’. Oh wow, Facebook, ‘Stars’?! How magical! How special!

I haven’t the faintest idea what this shit is, and I don’t care, but let’s click on it anyway. Clicking on it takes me to a page titled ‘Monetisation’ – right, Facebook, because it was obvious that that’s where the link would lead. I’m presented with a ‘Status’, where I’m told that I have ‘No monetisation breaches’. Well fan-bloody-tastic, Facebook.

Under that is, again, ‘Tools to try’, where it says ‘Stars’ again. This was the wrong page to take me to, Facebook – make your links work properly, you absolute morons. Here, at least, there is a brief description of what ‘Stars’ are. They are a kind of pretend currency that Facebook has made up. In a million years, Facebook, I would never have guessed that that’s what they were.

And by this point, I’m completely lost. I could not tell you what part of the Facebook website I have found myself on.

Meanwhile, I can’t even remember the last time I saw a post from an actual friend on this site.

I’m going back to DVDs

Streaming is just so annoying now.

In the late 2000s and early 2010s I built up a large DVD collection. Well – it seems large to me, but I suppose compared to some collections it’s actually quite moderate. I don’t know the exact number, but I think it’s about 200 DVDs.

I was quite pleased with it, but by the mid 2010s it seemed quite pointless. Lots of what was in my collection was available on Netflix, and anything that wasn’t was likely an old-ish movie – 90s or early 2000s – and not something I was likely to rewatch that often. Also, I was running out of space. I have two shelves for DVDs – both of which have long been full, and I’ve just been stacking up the rest on top. It’s at risk of falling off the wall.

So I stopped adding to it. All was fine for a few years, but I’ve now decided to (mostly) abandon streaming for DVDs once more.

Streaming was fine when it was just Netflix. Now, though, in order to maintain access to the movies and television shows I like to watch, I have to have a subscription to Disney+ and Amazon Prime Video too, as well as buying some movies and shows through YouTube. When BritBox still existed I had to have a subscription to that too, and when Game of Thrones was on and still good I had to pay for NowTV (which was the shittest service I have ever encountered – I wasn’t so much watching a television show as enduring a PowerPoint presentation).

What’s even worse is that half the time I don’t even know where something’s going to be available. (I think most people get around this via their ‘smart TV’ – but I don’t have one – television for me is just something that’s open on a different browser tab.) And things come and go from different platforms. Something that I think is going to be available somewhere often turns out to no longer be.

And the most egregious sin of Netflix: when only the second movie of a trilogy is available. Why would I want to watch only the second movie of a set of three, Netflix? I will watch all three or none at all.

Streaming is now neither cheap nor convenient. (Add to that Hollywood’s burning desire to edit old movies and television shows to delete anything that doesn’t fit their latest extremist ideology and soon I’m paying a lot of money not to watch a heavily-censored movie.) DVDs nowadays seem to be very cheap (if you’re still on the old pre-Blu-ray ones as I am (yes I realise that makes me seem very old)), and they also allow for the wonderful surprise of rediscovering a movie you had otherwise forgotten about.

So I’m swapping back. Time to put up some more shelves.

When do you get to call yourself a ‘writer’ or an ‘author’?

This is a question that’s asked a lot on YouTube and on other social media sites by people who either are writing a book or people who want to write a book.

Everyone has a different answer to this question. At one extreme, some people say that you are only an author or a writer once you’re making a lot of money from books you’ve written. This is a very unpopular opinion, as it would mean that lots of people who are generally considered authors or writers by most other people would now lose the title – it would be a fairly useless definition. At the other end, some people say that you are a writer if you write. This definition is, in a literal sense, completely true, but also so broad as to possibly make the title ‘writer’ useless.

Now, I’ll start this post by saying that actually I really don’t mind how anyone else decides to use these terms – you want to call yourself a writer or an author? Go ahead – it doesn’t bother me. I’m not writing this post to try to suggest a ‘right’ definition for these terms – use whatever criteria you want.

The reason why I’m writing this post is because I had strict criteria that I used for myself – before I would call myself an ‘author’ – and it was very rewarding. And other people may also find it rewarding, so I thought I’d write it down in a blog post, in case anyone else wants to do it too.

(I’ll also say at this point that I’ve never really had any interest in the word ‘writer’ – I technically am a writer, but I’ve never used the word to describe myself. The word I’ve always fixated on is ‘author’ – the rest of this blog post is going to be about the word ‘author’, but it could equally apply to ‘writer’ if that’s the term you prefer.)

I only started referring to myself as an ‘author’ once I’d published my first fiction book (which was Zolantis back in 2018). I had been writing fiction for many years before that, but I only allowed myself to start using the term once I had published some of that fiction in my first book. There weren’t any criteria on what kind of book it had to be – it didn’t have to be a novel (in the end it was, but Zolantis wasn’t planned as a novel – it’s really more of a long novella). It didn’t have to sell loads of copies either – in fact I didn’t care if it didn’t sell any copies at all. It just had to be a book, and it had to be published.

Doing it this way was very motivating, because for the entire time before publishing Zolantis, I really wanted to finish a book, so that I could start using the title ‘author’. The desire to have a book of which I was the author, and to be able to start using the title ‘author’, gave me the drive to finish Zolantis. And then when I did finish it, not only did I have the reward of a book that I could hold in front of me that was mine, but I could also start using the title.

And this would be my advice to anyone else: if you wait until your first book is published before using these terms, it will drive you to finish that first book (and the first one is often the hardest one to finish).

A New Year’s Day Tradition

Over the last five years or so I have gradually developed a number of my own traditions around Yule and the new year. One of these is that on New Year’s Day I try to do lots of the activities that I want to do throughout the year. If I want to do lots of writing that year, then I do some writing on New Year’s Day. If I want to make lots of videos for my YouTube channel that year, then I do something related to making videos on New Year’s Day (it doesn’t have to be actually recording a video – I could just do something that’s useful generally, like learning more about how to light videos).

Now this isn’t about New Year’s resolutions – I don’t do New Year’s resolutions (because I think if a resolution is worth making then it’s worth making at whatever time of year you happen to think about it). This tradition isn’t about getting a head-start on New Year’s resolutions. Instead it’s just about having a good start to the year. If I want to do lots of writing in a given year, then if I do lots of writing on the first day of the year, by the end of the first day the year’s going very well – 100% of it was spent doing the things that I wanted to do.

This tradition is about making the first day of the year the example day for the rest of the year. If all the days can be like the first day, then it will be a good year. My aim on this New Year’s Day is to do a lot of reading, and maybe go through a lot of my old writing notes and scan in anything that only exists in paper form.