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’m glad we still have your voice in any format. We need it.
Happy to be back on the blog! I never unsubscribed. I continue to look forward to reading what you write. 😉
Please, I beg of you, use ghost.io or something similar and not give money to the crazy WordPress guy.
But I’ll follow you wherever… keep up the good work!
WordPress is free software. It’s perfectly possible to use it without giving any money to Automattic. As far as I can tell from a quick reverse-DNS lookup, this blog is not hosted by Automattic. And any further discussion of “the crazy WordPress guy”, as fascinating as it may be, is probably off topic for here.
Thanks for the invite over to a more peaceful space where you can show us your more authentic self. 💜
I hold Star Trek near and dear to my heart, of course loving Westley, so being able to see that you Wil are a kind and caring person caring that Trek heart is quite refreshing.
Looking forward to reading things you feel proud of and uncensored in.
Well said!
RSS is still working for me in Feedly, for which I’m grateful. Not a patch on Google Reader (RIP) but you get that. I too decided to dump FB, and while I do go back and check out my Friends™ feeds with FB Purity preventing the worst of the spam, I no longer comment. Those of us who ditched nasty things before it was suddenly common to do so (e.g. people who didn’t like JK Rowling before she graduated from antisemitic caricatures to full on TERF nazi) need a name, and I propose we be called Skipsters. So I’m a Skipster regarding Facebook, but that and three bucks won’t even buy me a coffee, which is fine because I don’t drink coffee…
Anyhow, that’s a rambling nonsensical way to say I’m still reading everything you write, and being glad that you exist and you survived your childhood and you now have a life that works. Carry on, young Time Lord, and never EVER shut up!
I’m glad you have another outlet I can follow you on (even if it did take me three reads of your FB post to figure out where I was supposed to be looking! [eye roll] I’m old, don’t judge!)
🤔 must learn more about these “blogs”. I too am thinking of ditching FB but, my friend and I run several groups on there? How would we recreate them and where? Oh hum, things for us to puzzle through. I’m sure there are alternatives.
Anyway! Proud of you Wil. You have the willpower and conviction to carry it through. Behind you all the way! 👏🏻👏🏻 🖖🏻
Thanks Wil for always standing in solidarity with us trans folks. It means more now than ever. Much love.
Thanks for being you, Wil. 🥹
Subscribed via Feedly, which I haven’t looked at in an age, but still seems to work just fine!
It was easy for me to find/subscribe so I’m guessing it’s fixed now.
Psh, I smashed that button so long ago, we didn’t even call it smash yet.
I hadn’t have kids yet and now I have a kid in high school. HIGH SCHOOL, WIL.
I know, that wasn’t for people like me who never go away. I hope to quit facebook someday but I have a small community there I need. Instead I set my screen limit to 15 minutes and report all ads as spam so I don’t waste my life scrolling trash. I’m proud of you.
Subscribed! I hope we’ll get Marlowe Mondays and all that good stuff. I’ve been a follower of yours for decades now and I love hearing from you. Funny that reading RSS feeds used to be fun and all the good RSS readers went away. I much prefer the email subscribing now.
I’ll be where you are. Thanks for sharing your words.
Don’t want to lose you, sir. Thanks for making it easy for this old dude.
I’m doing the same thing, Wil, driving people to my blog and my substack. Substack has had issues with haters using it, but I find it’s still a good bolster to bring ppl to my site. As for block editors…I HATES THEM. I refuse to use them – there are plugins to leave your template with “classic” editing. Block editing is ridiculous and it was added to resemble WIX. If I wanted WIX, I’d be there, yanno? Anyway, I’ve always followed your blog and I’ll continue. MY blog is in its 26th year! OLDS FTW! 🙂
Happy birthday to moi, I have subscribed!
Should have done this yahrens ago. Good on you.
Thank you Wil! Thank you @DiaryofaMom!
Smashed that Subscribe button! My burning question to you: will you be posting your Discord link here from time to time, too?
Don’t worry, I cant figure out WordPress either…
I have been an almost daily visitor to this blog for over 20 years. I will continue to be an almost daily visitor to this blog. Thank you for being you.
This. 🙂
10:28 AM CST, and I have a “subscribe” button on the lower right of the article (but I could read it fine without doing anything else when I visited the site). I also have one on the lower right of my entire window, and when I clicked to leave a comment, I got a pop up asking me to subscribe. Just FYI as tp the current state on a Windows desktop running Firefox. But I’m here from…here, Wil, so we’re good. 😉
And thanks. I finally did the thing I needed to do for a long time, as you might remember from another comment here, and got out of a shitty relationship. So I can be more open about my gender now, and this trans masc thanks you for the support. I have a FB account. I only use it for cosplay stuff. I don’t know where to get that info otherwise (for meetups, etc, at cons). I hope an alternative comes along, because I don’t want to be there even a little bit.
Oh, incidentally, every time I comment here, I get a “welcome to WWdN” (though I don’t think it abbreviates is) email from WordPress. I’m, like, um…way to stay current there, WordPress. I don’t mind, but I find it hilarious. It just started in the past few months or so.
Anyway, sending peace and love and thanks for the commitment. You won’t miss FB. It’ll all be fine.
Wabbit! My dude! I am so happy for you to be yourself.
Been coming here for longer than I care to remember (not that long after you started blogging, somewhere around 2001/02, certainly before ‘Nemesis’), and you’ve been in my RSS feed ever since, so no change for me. I’ve never had Facebook and left ‘X’ recently for obvious reasons. Keep being you!
Thanks, man! Been a long time coming on both getting out of the relationship (should be legal soon – rushed that along after November, if you know what I mean) and the other stuff, but it feels so good to finally be able to breathe. To be, as a friend says, celebrated, not tolerated. Yeah. Thanks.
PS (first response hasn’t shown up yet, but it will in time – that does seem to be an issue I have here, but it’s whatever): My WordPress avatar/profile pic here is one you took at a con in … Austin (?) many years ago. You excitedly posted my duct tape Sparks McGee to Twitter (back when Twitter was cool) and the first comment after an acquaintance ID’d me was, “is that a guy or a girl?” That upset me at the time (a bit) due to a lot of baggage with that through the years and also just because why do people have to do shit like that? (And it doesn’t make sense, since it’s pretty femme, but whatever.) But it doesn’t upset me now. Because the answer is “yes.” Can’t help my anatomy, and haven’t transitioned in the “real world” yet for the most part, but with people who actually matter? Well, maybe I’ll introduce myself with my new name one day if our paths ever cross again. But for now, wabbit and he/they works just fine. Keep on trucking, Wil. 😉
Hi Wil,
I left Facebutt about two months ago for much the same reason: the enshittification. It was becoming an X clone. (“Eject, eject, eject!”). That decision came at a high personal cost, as i lost contact with many friends. I’m only on BlueSky now. I’ll stay as long as it is a civilized place. At my age, I’ve had enough drama and insults in my life.
I’m on the Subscription list, so I get an email when you post. I hope to meet you in February when you’re in Springfield MO.
I have been checking your blog daily for years, and will continue to do so. Is there some advantage TO YOU for me to subscribe? If so, I will gladly do it, but I will see whatever you post without it.
And I REALLY appreciated your post immediately after the election. It captured the emotions that I could not express myself. Thank you.
Honestly, I needed a kick in the pants to start separating myself from those sites. Getting back into newsletters over media feeds seems like the right way to do it. Thanks for the nudge! 🍻
Thanks so much for the help and I’m glad to be on board
I’ve been subscribed here for years I think since I saw you had a WordPress via Tumblr.
I’ve been a visitor to this blog for longer than I care to remember (at least 25 years?), never left. Never had Facebook, sacked off ‘X’ recently for all the obvious reasons. Keep being you!
I follow you here on the blog, having largely ditched FB some time ago. Since I haven’t found anything I liked better than Google Reader (though I sort of liked The Old Reader), I just keep your blog bookmarked in Firefox, next to Scalzi and Doctorow, of course. All the best and happy to be here, glad you’re still here.
I self-imposed a Facebook hiatus in 2021 after falling out with a friend. I miss the friendship sometimes, but I don’t miss Facebook.
So happy to see you returning to the blog!! Just wanted to let you know how much I’ve enjoyed reading your thoughts here for years. Because I subscribe through an (old school) blog reader, I’m not sure I ever hit your stats as a subscriber or even blog visitor, so thought I’d pop in and let you know you have one more possibly invisible reader.
I never went to Facebook largely because Groklaw, when it existed, demonstrated clearly that control of your content depended on the laws (or lack thereof) of the country where the parent servers reside.
If you really want to create a presence, maybe you should resurrect Teh Soapbox, hmmm?
As a Gay man I wanted to thank you for being an Ally. Protecting Trans Rights is very important to me and my community, and we need all the support we can get.
This is so important to me that I spent Monday at the Georgia legislature, along with many people from all genders, and sexual orientations to make sure that all of the members of the Georgia House and Senate could see our resolve and hear our voices. I attended this protest as a volunteer for the Human Rights Campaign and intend to be there, in support of Transgender Rights at every opportunity.
Unfortunately, the very first bill introduced in the Senate (SB1) entitled the ‘Fair and Safe Athletic Opportunities Act’. Quoting the Senate website, the purpose of this bill is “to prohibit males from participating in interscholastic and intercollegiate competitions on teams designated as female” and “to prohibit females from participating in competition on intercollegiate teams designated as male”.
I’m amazed that the subject of Transgender individuals playing sports is the top item on the state GOP agenda, when many of them won the election on promises to improve our economy.
I’ve a Star Trek fan since I was a kid watching the original series and have never been prouder of how you and the entire Star Trek franchise have been such powerful and loud supporters of the LGBTQIA+ community. May your site “Live Long and Prosper”.
Hey, I get you via email, and on the RSS feed via dreamwidth.org (which is just like LiveJournal, only non-Russian and not homophobic). Keep up the good work!
Funny story: one one social media platform, that will remain unnamed, a poster described the horrific scene of an inherited house whose attic was filled with decades worth of pigeon filth. They shows pictures of the dozens of lawn-leaf bags full of the foul mass they trundled downstairs to dispose in a construction dumpster.
I commented “oof, that’s rough. I think you should have taken off and nuked it from orbit”. The audience, dutifully, responded with many obligatory “it’s the only way to be sure”’s).
I got permabanned for advocating violence.
I did get reinstated, but that’s when it really sank in that social media moderation has gone plaid.
Am not a fan of blocks myself. I’m still looking wistfully at the old format of just being able to write a blog and post it rather than plan a campaign of how to format my ideas!
Oh I’ve been subscribed forever but now I just found out I can get notifications on when you post, so yay! lol see you soon! 😁
It’s not you, the block editor is VERY frustrating… but anyway, welcome back! I hope more people return to their blogs in 2025!
It’s good to have your own space away from the techbros. I’ve had my own site in one form or another since 1996. Pop by some time, I have minimal cookies 😉
Classic Editor still works and I refuse to use anything else for straight up writing. I’m not making fancy stuff in my current active blog. I’m just scraping everything I care about before I nuke what’s left of my FB account.
There are three accounts on Bluesky. Hoping I followed the right one. Welcome to life after Meta.
I saw you at the Denver Comic Con several years ago and you were eloquently warning all of us that Facebook was the “shadow Internet”- a slick, shallow Internet substitute for those of us too lazy to find information and content. Thanks for helping wean us off of it!
Looking forward to following your wit and wisdom here!
I’m glad you have another outlet I can follow you on (even if it did take me three reads of your FB post to figure out where I was supposed to be looking! [eye roll] I’m old, don’t judge!)
🤔 must learn more about these “blogs”. I too am thinking of ditching FB but, my friend and I run several groups on there? How would we recreate them and where? Oh hum, things for us to puzzle through. I’m sure there are alternatives.
Anyway! Proud of you Wil. You have the willpower and conviction to carry it through. Behind you all the way! 👏🏻👏🏻 🖖🏻
I’m looking forward to the day that walled garden social media collapses and RSS comes back into fashion.
Thanks for this, Wil. The “before times” were better: decentralized. The guy who runs my favorite social media service is a middle class dad in Overland Park, KS – not a billionaire oligarch. I’m grateful for you taking this action of bringing back blogs and working to figure out how to let me add you to my “feed.”
Hey Wil, I’m glad you’re back on the blog! And also — I’d really appreciate if you would make a post about the Neil Gaiman disaster. As a big fan of yours and formerly big fan of his, I think it’s really important that feminists with public platforms (especially former colleagues and collaborators) speak out and actively support victims. I think you have an important voice here.
Yeah, I hear you. I am sickened to know that a person I called a friend was secretly a monster all along. I’m going to direct you to John Scalzi’s blog, where he says everything I would say if I had the spoons.
Thank you for the response — I appreciate it. Even knowing you’ve cut ties (which I expected was true, but, you know what they say about assumptions) is helpful.
Subscribe button smashed. Glad to be following your blog.
Following via RSS for years now 🙂
And I read every post.
While I probably will not subscribe, please know that I will always read what you have to say. Thank you for sharing your voice.
Wil, I dont know if you will see this but I am happy that I can now get an email notification from “the wil wheaton machine” when you post stuff. I’ve always enjoyed your stuff from the times when Bon Jovi was opening for Ratt, to BBT to books and audio books. On the FB, there are less than a handful of people that I actually cared about plus a few groups. Now there is one less of the cared about on FB. All I’m trying to say is “thanks and keep up the good work”.
Aw, thanks!
I’ve stayed subscribed for years. Mainly through rss and recently through WordPress reader. I think I’ve followed this blog since the collating papers meme/post. I have really enjoyed your blog both here and tumblr. I can understand the frustration with social media.