We’ve got another new issue at Facebook that we need to tell you about, one that’s going to cause all kinds of grief and consternation and disruption for the way we bring you the news.
When we first established this site, we had people coming here talking amongst themselves on our post comments feature and using it as a social networking site. That was doing okay until two factors occurred in 2010: The emergence of Facebook as THE social networking site in early 2010, and then one particularly prolific post commenter here who annoyed the piss out of the other readers and drove them away little by little beginning in early 2011. Then in late 2011 it was getting so bad that in an effort to be genteel about his presence, we had to lay out “ground rules” that were designed, among our HUNDREDS of commenters, to stop this one guy from spamming the boards.
Those ground rules virtually stopped the commenters’ ability to use this site as a social forum. We WANTED it to be used that way; we just didn’t want this one guy to be aggravating everyone…and we were getting not only messages and emails, but wholesale letters in the mail about him and how he was such a blowhard that he was driving people away. As a result of that, networking/commenting practically dried up here…but that was okay, because by then, EVERYBODY had gone to Facebook.
So we used Facebook as the place to everyone to input their thoughts. We were making posts about the mundane and silly as well as the significant and serious. Sometimes, when there was a breaking story that was very fluid and changed by the minute, we’d make a “breaking” Facebook post every ten or 15 minutes (think Charisma Perry, or the White County murders, where updates were so non-stop, we had to POST whole articles on Facebook), because to do so here would be to move the top post off its position on the page…and that would sometimes confuse people who were coming here to read it for the first time, if they stepped into a developing story in the middle of it.
That was working fine, though…until yesterday.
It was at that time that while putting up posts about delivery, we noticed that we weren’t able to SEE our posts after they went. YOU were able to see them, but we, the page admins, WEREN’T. After much tussling with our tech guy, we learned that Facebook is fucking with “algorithms,” and are trying to involve business sites—ALL business sites, not just the big ones with 9,800-12,000 fans—in what can only be termed a “pay-to-play” scheme. We here in Illinois are all too familiar with that notion: Somebody holds the purse strings, and if you want to get anywhere with what you’re doing, business or otherwise, you have to drop some coin into the purse. We can’t do that. We put most of our profit back into our print version so we can bring you the most detailed of everything in the news stories that are going on out there; we have to, because a lot of what we publish is covered more easily by the First Amendment in the print product than it is in the online version and certainly more than it is on Facebook. We’re less regulated in the print product. Which is why you should go ahead and expend that $3 a month; or the $5.99 here at the site…until one of these days, THAT’S going to get cut off too….our government is been looking for ways to regulate the ‘net and will not stop until they get it…but print will be a little harder.
So now we’re at the mercy of “the man” once again in that it works like this: if we want to keep our Facebook numbers high (and we need to, for financial considerations that we’re unable to post here), we have to keep Facebook people reading. If we want to keep people reading, we have to post on Facebook. However, now, after three posts on the day (and when have you ever seen us emerge from a MORNING on Facebook with less than about four or five posts? let alone a full 16-hour day like we do), we, as admin, don’t SEE our posts…unless we have three “shares” of the post, then we are magically able to see them again.
But sometimes, you don’t have time to “share,” nor do you have the impetus…we cover a HUGE area, and sometimes a post is just a brief informative thing, not something you, the reader, feel inclined to “share.” Take deliveries as an example, like we’ve been in since yesterday, when this jugfuck started. We announce usually when we’re done with a county, sometimes when we’re done with individual vendors in a county, in the event that it’s a huge vendor like Motomart in Olney. In one delivery day, we can go through up to seven counties, and if we get an early start, maybe more. But after the first three, we’re not able to SEE the posts…including whether we’ve announced deliveries in a specific area. We are so busy sometimes that we lose track of what we’ve announced. If we can’t see it, and we can’t remember if we’ve announced it, this poses a problem for us.
And that’s representative of just the MINOR problems it causes. I can’t go into the MAJOR problems it causes, because there are some hateful people out there, and they’ll jump on those problems and expand them, and suddenly, we’re at ELE (extinction level event), despite the fact that we’ve been to Facebook legal and have advised them in advance of problems and particular people who’ve caused them for us.
Why is Facebook doing this? Because they want business sites to “pay-to-play.” They got us all roped in and hooked on their dope of lots of hits for our websites and business expansion. Now, if we want the convenience of promoting our businesses through their website (because Facebook is just one big website), if we want to SEE more of OUR OWN DAMN POSTS than three, we have to PAY an amount for the “convenience.”
So we’re not sure what we’re going to do about the Facebook aspect. We’d like to dump Facebook, actually; mainly because we, being independent media, don’t want to be beholden to anything else out there…adn Facebook causes us to be.
But we know what we’re going to ask you to do.
We’re going to ask you to mark our page right here, not just our Facebook page, and log in during the day. Maybe keep a tab or screen up in the background if you can; a constant presence on your computer helps us. There’s nothing on our site that’s going to hurt your computer, no viruses, no bots crawling through your cookies. It just helps us if we’re ‘on’ your computer a LOT.
We’re also going to ask you to tell other people about this site. Believe it or not, there are plenty of people in southern Illinois who don’t know what Disclosure is, print version OR website. We are constantly running into it. So sent your friends a link. Ask them if they’ve heard of us. Tell them to comment here on the posts. The ground rules are much the same except for the fact that we’re lifting the “no socializing” thing. Like we said, that was specifically so we could gently tell ONE person that we could no longer tolerate his bloviating on the site. Now, he’s been removed altogether. And we’ll take other bloviating situations on a case-by-case basis. You may again speak freely, with only two cautions: no attacking the host (us), and no ad hominem attacks (attacking each other).
As well, we have a messaging section on this site now. You can see it if you sign up for the e-Edition. We ask that those who are using the the e-Edition start using that section if you’d like. We ask those who aren’t online members to consider doing so. It’s only $5.99 a month, and you get the entire newspaper, articles and photos, right here at the convenience of your computer or other device (iPad, phone, etc.) This messaging center is secure, and you can bring up topics, communicate with each other, all the things Facebook is doing in that realm, it’s just that it isn’t “your own page”…yet. We’re working toward that…give us time. In the meantime, we need your support in the form of your mere presence. We hope that’s not too much to ask.
There are other “social networking” sites like Facebook that haven’t become an arm of the government like Facebook ostensibly has. There’s Twitter. There’s World Truth. There’s Pinterest. There’s still the ghetto of social networking sites, MySpace. You can generally accomplish on those sites what you want to on Facebook unless you have something specific you’re trying to promote. We’re just trying to tell the news. And we’re getting stifled every time we turn around.
So think about it. Can you dump Facebook…or at least back off from it? We’d like to. We’d like to ask you to express your Facebook thoughts here at the articles instead of at the articles’ links on Facebook. Because unless we pay to play or three someones “share” us, we’re now not going to be able to SEE your comments….and we’d really like to interact. So think about it. Let’s don’t let one website dominate the flow of information or compromise it in any way. We can do it.