Thursday, May 13, 2021

Why It's Time to Leave Facebook

I joined Facebook primarily as a means of commenting on PolitiFact's fact check articles. It was and remains the only option for doing that, apart from commenting on Twitter.

But Facebook has an incomprehensible commenting system.

I can make a comment and then the record of that comment will disappear from my activity log. I think when that happens it means my comment was in reply to somebody who later blocked me. Okay, but why disappear the comment from my activity log?

I can make a comment that stays on my activity log but I cannot view it on the page location. Why? I don't know. And I don't know who can see the "public" comment, if anybody. I do have some evidence that others can see the comments I've made that I'm not permitted to view. How does that make sense?

Here's an example of how that works. I made a comment on a comment Z Smorris made on PolitiFact's page:

 

Facebook allows me to click on the comment to (supposedly) go to its location at PolitiFact's Facebook page.

That leads here:

No sign of it, though of course the default view is "Most Relevant" (upper right-hand corner). It's worth noting that the only relevant comment is obvious spam. Perfect, right?

So, let's change the view from "Most Relevant" to "All Comments" and see what happens.


Click!

We get a view that does not have any sign of Smorris' comment or of my reply. We get a different comment of mine prioritized to the top.  So we have to go digging into the other 46 comments (apparently some of those do not count toward the "42" listed above) to find Smorris' comment.

Away we go.


There's Smorris' comment! Now all I have to do is click on the "8 replies" and I'll see my reply. Right?

We're so naive.


 

No, I didn't hit the "Reply" button. I hit the "8 replies" button. That's what I got.

This system makes it extraordinarily difficult to carry on a reasonable conversation. It's ridiculous. And I have done experiments with similar outcomes over the past year.