Confession time: yes, we still use Facebook in this household!
Maybe that comes across sounding a bit like we're "conferring with the enemy," but truth be known the Meta giant is still useful in terms of keeping in touch with family and sharing photos of the grandkids and for me talking to my family back in Europe.
I was never a big Facebook supporter to begin with, because I am really more of a writer and blogger than I am just a social media user.
To the degree that I personally use facebook, it's mostly for messages, and for managing a couple of pages for my small home businesses. I also have a couple of groups that I occasionally check in on.
Mrs. Denmarkguy, on the other hand, is a more active user... both on a personal level as well as for her several pages, both for her Ministry and for other reasons.
A few months back she was offered a introductory subscription to meta's new premium version for $13 a month. Basically, Facebook's version of getting the blue Twitter check mark, which now also costs extra.
Supposedly, this was going to be a much better experience for users and so she decided to accept the offer because of (a) curiosity and (b) if it really was an improved version it would definitely help the business end of things.
In general, however, she has not been impressed. The ostensible promises or suggestions of promises that premium members "get somewhat preferred placement in other people's feeds" according to some algorithm that is a closely guarded state secret has turned out to actually not be true.
In short, it is turning out that premium really doesn't do much of anything that you can't do with a free Facebook. Of course they haven't confessed whether their next step will be to force people to get premium... or lose a bunch of their current free features.
This evening the "this is actually kind of useless" realization came to a head when she wanted to change her profile picture and there was a little message that popped up and said that "premium members cannot change their profile picture without going through resubmitting" the entire Facebook verified premium. Which was a process that took several days to begin with!
So seriously? These people are expecting to collect $13 a month (plus tax) for what actually amounts to no real additional benefits but actually additional hassles in fact... at least if you want to make any kind of changes.
I mean, let's face it... lots of people change their social media profile pictures on a regular basis whether it's because they're supporting some cause or because of the time of the year.
Needless to say, the introductory subscription is not going to be renewed!
I find it interesting and unsettling and slightly disgusting how many large organizations will start offering premium versions for extra money without really offering anything for that extra money. It's like the only real benefit apparently is some kind of boost to people's ego that they have a little blue check mark and they can say "I have premium" as opposed to just being a pleb with an ordinary subscription.
Pretty lame if you ask me!
Whereas there are a number of things that Hive still doesn't do - like photo albums and its own internal internal message system - I'm so glad I'm here more than I'm there!
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Created at 2023-11-18 01:27 PDT
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