Note to self: before you make a post on Facebook about how you’re leaving Facebook on account of Zuckerberg is a piece of shit, and tell everyone who reads it that they can subscribe to your blog … ensure that WordPress didn’t change the theme on you when you weren’t looking, hiding the formerly obvious subscribe button.
Here’s what I wrote there:
As an OG blogger who did everything in html, I resisted Facebook for years. I didn’t like the idea of being inside someone else’s garden, where I didn’t own or control my writing, photos, and so on.
But I ended up here because it’s where the people were, and I stayed here to the detriment of my own writing and my own website (that I worked so hard to build on my own in the Before Times).
Over the years, I’ve been put into Facebook jail for absolute bullshit, usually because of bad faith reports from dickheads, but also because a machine did a comically bad parsing of something I said. (Hey, die in a fire, machine!) As a consequence, I have ended up self-censoring, or even writing and creating to serve whatever the fucking algorithm wants, instead of what I want. It’s always bothered me, but at like a 1 on a 10 point scale. I’ve lived with it, and I’ve accepted the compromise.
And it’s been so frustrating to contort myself into all sorts of non-euclidean shapes, while literally every single time I report someone for hate speech, impersonation, scamming, a different kind of hate speech, terrorist threats, even more hate speech, the machine waits for weeks before it tells me that all of that hate speech was just peachy with Facebook and the gigantic piece of dogshit who owns it.
I’ve had one foot out the door on this website for a couple months, and now that Meta will allow and encourage hate speech against marginalized and vulnerable people (obviously so that right wing fuckfaces can do the thing, officially, that they’ve been doing all along) I am leaving for good.
There’s no reason for me to be here. Whether it’s because I’m boring or the algorithm is squashing me or some combination of both, engagement is way, way down over the last half of last year. And there is just way too much harassment, noise, bots, scammers, and overt fucking Nazism all over the place. If I’m going to reach a smaller audience, anyway, I’m going to reach it via my own blog where I actually care to keep that dogshit in the trash where it belongs.
I’ll let my blog crosspost here for a couple of weeks, and then I’m just going to let this account go fallow.
I sincerely hope that, if you have enjoyed following me here, that you’ll come over to my blog. There’s a simple form there, so you can get my posts by email, probably more reliably than you ever saw things here.
I also have Bluesky, though I’m going to use it minimally — the fire hose of social media is extremely bad for my (and your) mental health — and even then, mostly to let folks know when something I made is out in the world.
The people who work for me are going to be unhappy about this. I have a major project coming out in March, and it’s not the best idea to walk away from an account with a few hundred thousand followers … but when I walked away from three million followers on Twitter when fuckface von nepobaby turned it into a fascist propaganda tool, absolutely nothing changed for me, from a business perspective.
Put another way, my experience over the last 25 years has shown me that there is a core of people out there, you are likely among them if you’re still reading this (hi, Aunt Dorothy!), who care enough to go where I am. I’m counting on that pattern holding as I leave what has become yet another tool for fascists, authoritarians, bigots, Nazis, and other disgusting and deplorable people to use in their efforts to hurt people I love.
I’ll keep my Instagram up a little longer, unless or until this Zuckerberg approved policy of hate and toxic masculinity (why is it always the weakest little men who are so toxic, he asked, rhetorically) metastasizes there, as well.
Please come with me, back to my blog, where it all began.
On another note, I’m sure that the block editor is great when you understand it, but I am entirely lost when I try to use it. Nothing makes sense or follows a logical flow (that’s obvious to me, anyway), and it makes me feel stupid.
So I appreciate all of you who came here from wherever you came here from, and I am doubly grateful to all of you who have actually looked for that subscribe option. Because if it was anything like my experience, it was a massive pain in the ass.
Of course, at this moment, I believe you get annoying SUBSCRIBE stuff all over the place, including something you had to click to even see this (I think? Again, the documentation is confusing to my dumb ass) … but at least you can see it. And the layout is going to change a whole lot over the next couple of hours, while I figure this thing out.
If I can wrap my head around this, someone reading this late today or tomorrow will hopefully have no idea what this is all about, and if you are that person, I encourage you to celebrate by subscribing to my blog, so you never miss a post.
Thanks for your patience and support, y’all.
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I found your blog as I was searching online for articles about doing “Good Work”, this post of yours appeared from 2013 – “be honest, be kind, be honorable, work hard, and always be awesome”. That is just the sweetest story!! ❤️ I’m so glad I found your blog! I agree 100% with your reasons to leave Facebook and return to blogging.
To help out with subscribe trouble-shooting: So I’m on Windows/Firefox, and I have an RSS feed thing through blogger that I’ve followed you on since… 2013? Today, when going to your blog from there in a new tab, I got a mostly blank screen with a subscribe button in the middle and an option to “read more” (I think. it’s Friday afternoon and I’m tired.) Clicking on read more took me to your blog, but I can’t get that initial screen to appear again. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
In a social media world where everyone works so hard to have a fake veneer of perfection, it’s utterly charming to see these subscribe buttons EVERYWHERE and know a real person is struggling to figure out #$%@ wordpress.
I fully support the return of blogs. I’ve been following you for ages on my Feedly RSS reader, but after reading this I figured I’d officially subscribe as well.
Hi Wil.
This is Geoffrey Knob (whom you don’t know). Long time occasional reader, commenter and never-time caller.
I subscribed and look forward to reading your occasional posts. I agree with you on the social media stuff and pretty much about everything politically because I, like you, can think critically and have good information, not GIGO. I too am thinking of ditching Instagram but it’s the primary way I share photos with kids and friends. Hopefully, someone out there has another method of sharing photos which doesn’t put money in some fascist’s pocket. Amazon… well, that’s going to be harder to ditch, especially if the Orange Rump makes Nixon’s wet dream of eliminating the Postal Department come to fruition. (Yes, I am deliberately mis-stating history to make a point. I think of that point every time I see Miracle on 34th Street.)
One other item relating to Still Just a Geek. I am enjoying your book but I’m reading it slowly. Parts are very hard to get through for personal reasons. I know they were way harder for you to write and live so you have my sympathy. I’m also slowly ready Mark Twain’s Autobiography, which is massive! I now know why he never published it in his lifetime. Instead of reading as much as I used to, I find myself engaging in pleasure seeking activities more during my spare time. You try reading when you’re in Act 3 of Baldur’s Gate 3! I promise myself I will get back to reading soon if not, well then by Spring so I can finish our book and get more into the MT autobiography by Summer vacation.
Good luck! We will all need it until fascism is overthrown and our democracy restored.
AHHH! It’s Geoffrey Knobl… Ug… egg on face.
Your blog is interesting, but it is spamming my email box. It is not set to email me at all. And it will not let me unsubscribe, or let me find a sys admin. I have had to put this in my spam filter. Please either resolve this spamming or kick me the hell off this thing. I will continue to read it as a non member.
WordPress had me subscribed to comments. I shut that off. Hopefully it works.
Oh god I’m sorry. I am in “old man who doesn’t know how it works and hope it just works correctly” territory on this one. I hope the change you made resolved your issue.
I remember a Twilight Zone episode. “Of Late I Think of Cliffordville”. Julie Newmar, as the devil, tricks a bored businessman into going back to his childhood and achieving success all over again. The business man is clever- demanding to retain his current knowledge. Figuring, if he gets desparate, he can cheat; discover things early, invent things early.
Thing is, the man’s an end user. He knows that TV exists, could not build one. Knows that oil will be discovered under certain properties- but not how to build the drill to reach it.
The businessman’s name was Feathersmith, and I think we are ALL a bit Mr Feathersmith these days. Relying on hardware and programming that most of us barely understand.
My long winded way of saying-I wouldn’t worry about this. I think I have it resolved.
Be seeing you.