Illustration by Boris Toledo Doorm at dada.nyc
Important news: DADA users will no longer be able to sign up for DADA via Facebook.
If you signed up for DADA via a Facebook email account, we will ask you to sign up with your own email account and a strong, secure password.
We are also removing our Facebook page and our Facebook DADA account.
Why have we decided to take these measures?
We have hosted a DADA page on Facebook for about four years, in which we share the creations of our artists and keep people in the loop. We have over 16K followers but Facebook does not show our posts to the vast majority unless we pay to boost posts or buy ads. This means that only a couple of hundred souls, if not less, see our posts at any given moment. Facebook behaves like a monopoly and makes it hard for people to share links that take them away from Facebook. It essentially stonewalls any effort from our page to reach out to our followers while it profits from every time we so much as blink at the damn page.
We are a small startup. DADA is free to use by artists and art lovers alike. All our social reach is organic; we don't currently pay for our posts to appear on any social media. Our efforts to communicate with our followers on Facebook are then totally wasted.
DADA is a socially conscious company, and there are other things about Facebook that rub us the wrong way.
Facebook lets you post and communicate with friends and loved ones for "free". In exchange, it makes money off all your personal information. It spies on you. It knows what you like, what you want and what you dream of, and lets marketers know so they can sell it to you. Everyone makes money from you except YOU. On Facebook, you are not the customer, you are the product. They are selling YOU.
It's all very Orwellian. Drawing by Javier Errecarte
Recently, the very disturbing news that Facebook was hosting fake accounts that spread political disinformation, not only in the US but elsewhere, have also given us pause. We run a social network. We know how these things work. We know that every design decision we make impacts the user experience and the behavior of people in our community. Facebook's disingenuous claim that they didn't know about these accounts and their cavalier irresponsibility in their search for more clicks and more ad dollars, strikes us as nefarious.
Visual conversation by Beatriz Ramos and Otro
We are not naive. Facebook has become an essential means of communication for billions of people. Many of our artists use it to keep in touch with each other. This can be positive and very entertaining. But to be honest, we know that the social media negativity that we have been mostly able to avoid on DADA, through careful design and consideration, happens all too frequently on Facebook.
We cannot really compete with the powerful monopoly of social information that is Facebook. All we can do is improve our chat and our platform so our artists can feel free to communicate with each other within DADA. You can do so knowing that we do not profit from your personal information nor do we spy on anyone. In this respect, DADA is truly free for artists and art lovers.
Facebook makes friendship convenient, instead of meaningful. Designing for convenience always means sacrificing authenticity. Relationships on Facebook are like junk food: fast, convenient, and addictive but not very nourishing or good for you. The toxic effects of these new digital social interactions have been widely documented. Because of its business model, based on advertising and personal data sales, Facebook encourages facile, lazy connections (likes) and triggers insensitivity (not to mention cyberbullying and interference by a foreign power).
So we are kissing Facebook goodbye and we hope that you prefer to spend time with us. First and foremost, by making and enjoying art at dada.nyc.
You can also:
Join our homegrown chat.
Follow us on Twitter, or Instagram.
Subscribe to The DADA Digest, our monthly newsletter in English and Spanish.
And read this blog.
