Nevermind Apple, Facebook has lost its mojo

It’s fashionable for tech journalists to periodically write about Apple losing its mojo.

It can create a spike of views and readers.

But it also is mostly fake news.

Apple’s approach to negative news, and would-be news reports of all kinds is to simply have no comment (per its standard operating procedure). Apple’s silence towards the media and its speculation over their product lineups always bests any official news releases they could issue rebutting groundless criticism.

To his credit, CEO Tim Cook has spoken out on the issues of privacy and confidentiality–but has left the missives directed at Apple’s supposed decline to roost in silence.

After a period of no longer than 15 minutes, the less than glowing speculation about Apple is soon forgotten–that is, until the next round of no-story blog posts are issued forecasting Apple’s ensuing fall from grace.

In the case of Facebook, it truly is a completely different beast, especially considering its current state as it relates to the media coverage it is receiving.

People are leaving Facebook in droves. And it began before the social media giant’s recent issues over privacy.

Users that aren’t completely leaving Facebook have drastically cut back on their use and sharing practices–myself included.

In my case, spending less time on Facebook just made more sense than to re-commit to largely wasting daily chunks of time best put to use elsewhere.

I first removed the Facebook app from my phone.

If you are interested in weaning yourself off Facebook, or cutting down on your use gradually, I’d encourage you to first eliminate all traces of it on your phone.

Each day, we use our phones and the apps on them. If you take Facebook off your phone, then you have to use another device to access it–making it more challenging to use Facebook.

At its inception, Facebook urged its members to share, share and share some more.

That unofficial motto has led to its current image identity crisis.

If you want people to become attention harlots, then yes, you need to keep letting them know they should keep up their prolific (read daily) sharing practices.

I knew from day one if I was sharing stuff on Facebook, then it would be really dopey of me to expect that my information would not be at least warehoused like a good data hoard for use at a future date.

Facebook disconnect sadness

This is a self-penned phenomena I experienced when I did log in to Facebook by computer once I removed the app from my phone.

Specifically, I was regretting not being timely with my birthday wishes for my Facebook friends.

For me, Facebook had been reduced to a place I found useful for wishing someone happy birthday.

After further review, I chalked up this regret as nothing more than an unintentional strategy on Facebook’s part to tug at the emotional strings of those of us who have found our returns to everyday life pre-Facebook, quite satisfying.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s assurances of his company’s taking measures to properly safekeep personal information notwithstanding, a lot of users reducing time spent on the social media giant, if not completely moving away from it altogether, simply don’t care any longer; the trust factor has been breached (along with some of our personal data).

Another dagger in the heart for bloggers who auto-blast their posts to their Facebook profiles (not Facebook pages), is the recent announcement by WordPress that effective August 1, 2018, third-party tools can no longer share posts automatically to Facebook Profiles. This impacts my posts as if I want to continue posting blog posts to my Facebook profile, I will have to do so manually.

I get that it’s part of Facebook’s re-dedication to privacy.

But Facebook was never meant to be private.

For sharing has never been confused as a practice consistent with maintaining privacy.

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