Yeah, it's just grown progressively worse over time. It did seem to remain good for the Lodge up until the last year or two, but now that has completely tanked as well.
That makes sense. It's hard to walk away from it as WM, knowing that for a certain generation of Brothers, it's their primary online experience. We still need to reach those guys somehow.
It is interesting to me that out of all the big social media platforms, none of them are open source. I would think that an open source, non profit, user run platform would be really attractive to a lot of people.
In fact, there should be an international standard protocol for aggregating feeds from different platforms. Unfortunately, that would threaten ad revenue, so I'm not sure how we will overcome that.
Yeah, ad revenues are the problem. Heck, they are the reason these platforms enshitify themselves in the first place. Doing everything they possibly can to maximize ad income.
But, I do have to wonder if people wouldn't pay a fee for a aggregating service like that? It seems like it would be awesome. FB, X, Substack, and everything else all in one place.
Maybe not, but maybe so. You mentioned Wikipedia, it is funded by donations. As is England's Guardian newspaper. Heck, even Emeth here is funded by the generosity of its readers.
Yes, the Wikimedia Foundation, which I contribute to from time to time. But almost all the heavy lifting is volunteer crowdsourcing, which I also participate in. But if we spent the tiniest fraction of the world's military budget - just once -- the investment would live off interest forever.
I have never had that problem over the years but I learned after a few years to almost NEVER post things as *Public* which is why you have had this problem all the time.
The very few I post in Public is just so a Mason might like to see it and they get the message from a member on my friends list since I don't even have everyone from my 2 Lodges on my friends list.
(usually just what we have going on at CERN at the time and the next day or two I will change it back to friends members only)
Only people on my friends list get to see what I say and I have no desire to claim to have thousands of "Friends" on FB and make things Public so they can get all of your information and then ask to be your friend and next thing you know a certain fakebook group starts going for that Illuminati scam and they do that with Masonic Lodge's FB accounts too.
You can have the same problem here as far as people around the world seeing this page and seeing what they can do with it.
Yeah, you are right, but keeping it more closed down, a lot of these problems wouldn't exist.
But, that would defeat the purpose of my being on Social Media in the first place. I joined long ago to promote Freemasonry, and in order to do that I've had to keep my potential reach as wide as possible.
I don't worry so much about Substack. Not at this point anyway. I have 100% confidence that if some other "MW Cameron Bailey" popped up here talking about Freemasonry the Substack people would have it removed within an hour of it being reported. There are things that they must do to remain squeaky clean both with the big email providers and the credit card providers.
I remember back 25 years ago when ESPN had message boards for every team and sport and we would get people copy our ID's and start trouble and people would believe it was the person they copied and start all kinds of trouble........of course that was way before what we have now since things like FB or Twitter or all the others were not invented for about a decade.
But I was a sports guy as soon as I started watching it on tv in the 1960's and in the 80's and 90's I played City League basketball for 20 years and a weightlifter.
Might explain why I feel like I am 100 years old now.
See you at the BBQ........I may be the guy walking with the cane
(also why I didn't make it to Wenatchee this year and still not happy about that)
Ah, Usenet was awesome back in the day. I'm not quite sure how to describe it, massive, decentralized message boards, little to no moderation. Really really cool. I understand it is still used today, but not popular.
I imagine that I will still post links to my stuff from time to time, try to encourage folks to follow me here, but I just can't see trying to build anything further there.
“ But, Facebook is extremely slow at taking action, when it takes any action at all. Generally getting them to act requires the generation of a large number of complaints. Ultimately, Facebook allows these scams to exist across its platform, scams that financially harm well meaning people”
The only facts action I see Facebook take is to put you in jail when a so called Factchecker doesn’t like your post! Lol! And it’s quick! During the Covid lockdown as I was in jail I think about three times. You’re better off without a Facebook account. But it is how I stay in contact with friends I’ve known a long time and many family members.
I am in the slow process of removing all of my posts from the last 15 years, at which point I’m seriously thinking of deleting it. If you don’t delete them first before you disable your account, the posts will still be there. In the cloud.
Now that you mentioned it, I decided to quickly sign on and check.
Facebook still has not restored my post that was wrongly removed. And, it was removed within hours of my making it.
Neither has Facebook removed the Scam Profile that I discovered, and reported on the same morning that they removed my post. Every single post and photo on that Scam Profile is either my stolen intellectual property, or the stolen intellectual property of the Grand Lodges of Kansas and Virginia. And the crook has been active, he's up to 114 'friends' already.
100% add to that the fact that facebook allows fraudulent fake grand lodge pages and will do nothing about it. Indeed seemingly protecting them. I'm done. Finding relevant posts from friends and colleagues is nearly impossible. It's all garbage. Not worth selling my privacy for. I'll be done with ddgm this year and will be unplugged there after.
Yeah, I didn't know about the fake GL Pages that have proliferated until fairly recently. I was gleefully sharing posts from another US Grand Lodge, when finally one of my friends pointed out to me that the posts were from a fake GL Page mimicking the real GL.
I can't understand why FB won't do anything about all these pages that are so obviously scams, and so obviously stealing copyrighted intellectual property, but you are right, it is almost as if they are protecting the crooks.
I've decided that I'm done with it now. Other than posting links into my stuff here, in an attempt to get people to follow me to this platform.
Agreed. Years ago I thought that Social Media was a great thing for us, but looking back we can see how these platforms have badly destabilized young people, and fostered hate and division throughout society.
I imagine that things could have gone another way, but they profited by acting badly, so continually chose the low road.
So it would seem. Really they all are in the business of tracking and selling your metadata and your attention, not advertising, or offering subscription services. That is the societal cost and really the price for these "free" services. I for one am all about keeping our government as local as possible and allowing governance to be enacted at the community level, baring protection of basic liberties and rights. In so much the media, or news orgs, should be the same local and diverse. They really should serve as the the 4th leg of our republic holding the other 3 accountable. Unfortunately are now consolidated and owned by a few stakeholders with private influence and interest.
In retrospect we collectively made the decision to allow corporations to take our data, instead of paying for their services. A decision that we will regret for a very long time I think.
Ultimately, we need to move to a different model. A model whereby we pay with our dollars instead of our privacy.
"Undoubtedly moderating something as massive as Facebook would be a shockingly huge job. But Meta is a shockingly huge and shockingly rich corporation. They need to do their job, and do not have an excuse for not doing their job properly."
I'm with ya, one hundred percent! Facebook has been like this for a long time. That's why I left as well.
Yeah, it's just grown progressively worse over time. It did seem to remain good for the Lodge up until the last year or two, but now that has completely tanked as well.
Quit Facebook years ago over censorship and poor security with private data. Never looked back, one of my better decisions.
I feel your pain. I’m willing to stick it out until my term as WM ends next June.
Jay
That makes sense. It's hard to walk away from it as WM, knowing that for a certain generation of Brothers, it's their primary online experience. We still need to reach those guys somehow.
I despise facebook but it is the only way I have to keep in touch with some people
Yeah, that's the trouble, some folks only use it. We've all got to move together! 😁
I totally respect this.
Unfortunately, social media is the public commons for humanity at this time in history, and a huge part of it is Facebook.
We need a non-profit NGO to run this, similar to the Wikipedia model which works incredibly well.
It is interesting to me that out of all the big social media platforms, none of them are open source. I would think that an open source, non profit, user run platform would be really attractive to a lot of people.
AMEN to that, Brother!
In fact, there should be an international standard protocol for aggregating feeds from different platforms. Unfortunately, that would threaten ad revenue, so I'm not sure how we will overcome that.
Yeah, ad revenues are the problem. Heck, they are the reason these platforms enshitify themselves in the first place. Doing everything they possibly can to maximize ad income.
But, I do have to wonder if people wouldn't pay a fee for a aggregating service like that? It seems like it would be awesome. FB, X, Substack, and everything else all in one place.
Maybe not, but maybe so. You mentioned Wikipedia, it is funded by donations. As is England's Guardian newspaper. Heck, even Emeth here is funded by the generosity of its readers.
Yes, the Wikimedia Foundation, which I contribute to from time to time. But almost all the heavy lifting is volunteer crowdsourcing, which I also participate in. But if we spent the tiniest fraction of the world's military budget - just once -- the investment would live off interest forever.
I have never had that problem over the years but I learned after a few years to almost NEVER post things as *Public* which is why you have had this problem all the time.
The very few I post in Public is just so a Mason might like to see it and they get the message from a member on my friends list since I don't even have everyone from my 2 Lodges on my friends list.
(usually just what we have going on at CERN at the time and the next day or two I will change it back to friends members only)
Only people on my friends list get to see what I say and I have no desire to claim to have thousands of "Friends" on FB and make things Public so they can get all of your information and then ask to be your friend and next thing you know a certain fakebook group starts going for that Illuminati scam and they do that with Masonic Lodge's FB accounts too.
You can have the same problem here as far as people around the world seeing this page and seeing what they can do with it.
Good luck MW
Yeah, you are right, but keeping it more closed down, a lot of these problems wouldn't exist.
But, that would defeat the purpose of my being on Social Media in the first place. I joined long ago to promote Freemasonry, and in order to do that I've had to keep my potential reach as wide as possible.
I don't worry so much about Substack. Not at this point anyway. I have 100% confidence that if some other "MW Cameron Bailey" popped up here talking about Freemasonry the Substack people would have it removed within an hour of it being reported. There are things that they must do to remain squeaky clean both with the big email providers and the credit card providers.
I remember back 25 years ago when ESPN had message boards for every team and sport and we would get people copy our ID's and start trouble and people would believe it was the person they copied and start all kinds of trouble........of course that was way before what we have now since things like FB or Twitter or all the others were not invented for about a decade.
I don't remember the ESPN boards (never much into sports) but I used to spend a lot of time on Usenet in the early days.
Must admit I never heard of Usenet
But I was a sports guy as soon as I started watching it on tv in the 1960's and in the 80's and 90's I played City League basketball for 20 years and a weightlifter.
Might explain why I feel like I am 100 years old now.
See you at the BBQ........I may be the guy walking with the cane
(also why I didn't make it to Wenatchee this year and still not happy about that)
Ah, Usenet was awesome back in the day. I'm not quite sure how to describe it, massive, decentralized message boards, little to no moderation. Really really cool. I understand it is still used today, but not popular.
I understand completely. I’m stuck there due to work and helping with some Masonic groups but it’s not getting any better…possibly getting worse.
I imagine that I will still post links to my stuff from time to time, try to encourage folks to follow me here, but I just can't see trying to build anything further there.
Years ago we experimented with FB ads.
We were in Vancouver, BC in a particular neighborhood. We identified our desired demographic and geographic area.
Once we paid FB we got an immediate and significant increase in FB traffic - all of it from Russia.
FB scams us all.
Thanks for that feedback. I appreciate it. I have zero experience with Facebook ads, so I guess just assumed that they would be properly targeted.
“ But, Facebook is extremely slow at taking action, when it takes any action at all. Generally getting them to act requires the generation of a large number of complaints. Ultimately, Facebook allows these scams to exist across its platform, scams that financially harm well meaning people”
The only facts action I see Facebook take is to put you in jail when a so called Factchecker doesn’t like your post! Lol! And it’s quick! During the Covid lockdown as I was in jail I think about three times. You’re better off without a Facebook account. But it is how I stay in contact with friends I’ve known a long time and many family members.
I am in the slow process of removing all of my posts from the last 15 years, at which point I’m seriously thinking of deleting it. If you don’t delete them first before you disable your account, the posts will still be there. In the cloud.
Now that you mentioned it, I decided to quickly sign on and check.
Facebook still has not restored my post that was wrongly removed. And, it was removed within hours of my making it.
Neither has Facebook removed the Scam Profile that I discovered, and reported on the same morning that they removed my post. Every single post and photo on that Scam Profile is either my stolen intellectual property, or the stolen intellectual property of the Grand Lodges of Kansas and Virginia. And the crook has been active, he's up to 114 'friends' already.
And they don’t do a thing about it! 🤬Post something truthful about politics and it’s down in a second!
Yep. It is well past time that we all abandon that insane platform. Let it go the way of myspace.
100% add to that the fact that facebook allows fraudulent fake grand lodge pages and will do nothing about it. Indeed seemingly protecting them. I'm done. Finding relevant posts from friends and colleagues is nearly impossible. It's all garbage. Not worth selling my privacy for. I'll be done with ddgm this year and will be unplugged there after.
What content you do get from fb seems to be toxic any way.
Yeah, I didn't know about the fake GL Pages that have proliferated until fairly recently. I was gleefully sharing posts from another US Grand Lodge, when finally one of my friends pointed out to me that the posts were from a fake GL Page mimicking the real GL.
I can't understand why FB won't do anything about all these pages that are so obviously scams, and so obviously stealing copyrighted intellectual property, but you are right, it is almost as if they are protecting the crooks.
I've decided that I'm done with it now. Other than posting links into my stuff here, in an attempt to get people to follow me to this platform.
I'm not sure that FB has had any net positive benefit to society in hindsight.
Agreed. Years ago I thought that Social Media was a great thing for us, but looking back we can see how these platforms have badly destabilized young people, and fostered hate and division throughout society.
I imagine that things could have gone another way, but they profited by acting badly, so continually chose the low road.
So it would seem. Really they all are in the business of tracking and selling your metadata and your attention, not advertising, or offering subscription services. That is the societal cost and really the price for these "free" services. I for one am all about keeping our government as local as possible and allowing governance to be enacted at the community level, baring protection of basic liberties and rights. In so much the media, or news orgs, should be the same local and diverse. They really should serve as the the 4th leg of our republic holding the other 3 accountable. Unfortunately are now consolidated and owned by a few stakeholders with private influence and interest.
In retrospect we collectively made the decision to allow corporations to take our data, instead of paying for their services. A decision that we will regret for a very long time I think.
Ultimately, we need to move to a different model. A model whereby we pay with our dollars instead of our privacy.
I am quite certain it has had a severe negative impace on politics and mental health.
Agreed.
"Undoubtedly moderating something as massive as Facebook would be a shockingly huge job. But Meta is a shockingly huge and shockingly rich corporation. They need to do their job, and do not have an excuse for not doing their job properly."
Facebook never did restore wrongly removed post reviewing a local business.
And at least 2 fake profiles of me are up on Facebook today, despite being reported.
So, I've stuck with my plan. I'm only using Facebook now to advertise my own posts and Masonic things. I'm not using it for interaction at all.