a Farewell to Facebook

I wrote this a few days ago on FB, because I’m out. ๐Ÿ™‚
#

I’m paring down my FB presence. For the last week I’ve only been on for a brief time each day. I’ll be taking that down even further. I’ll be posting links when I blog for the people who stick around. There’s a few groups I use here that I can’t get the equivalent resource anywhere else yet (but I’m currently banned from posting in all groups anyway). And that’s about it. Basically, I’m done being a content creator for those censorious pieces of shit.

Guys like me write stuff which gets shared hundreds of times and gets thousands of people commenting/participating. FB uses that free content to keep people corralled here so they can mine your data. And then when us content creators get uppity, they fuck us over with impunity while their ideological allies get a pass. But then we come crawling back again and again, like abused trailer park wives, because we don’t want to abandon the kids (as in the communities we spent the last ten years building before the relationship turned abusive). I’ve stuck around because I didn’t want to hurt my business/sales. It is still the best place to reach the most people the fastest. We made it that way. All us content creators foolishly moved over there back when Facebook promised to be one thing. Now that they’ve pulled a bait and switch, the content creators feel trapped. In good conscience, this can’t continue.

I’m done helping those parasites. Facebook is trash. We all know it. We’ve all seen it. We’re just there because of inertia. Over the last decade, working with some stupendous moderators and great fans, we built a gigantic, thriving, fun, fan page here on Facebook. It’s one of the bigger author fan pages on the internet where the author can still actually talk to his fans. Being able to interact there was great. But Facebook took that from me on a whim.

They banned me from my own group because of what I MIGHT say.

However we prepared a fallback. There’s another Monster Hunter Nation fan page over on MeWe. LINK I’ll be posting there instead from here on. If the fans want to keep posting there, great, but I won’t be. I can’t even post this to my own FB fan page, which illustrates just how screwed up this situation is. We’ll see how long that lasts, until Big Tech finds some way to squish every place they can’t control. My primary place will still be here on my blog, monsterhunternation dot com. There is an email newsletter you can sign up for which is only book related stuff, no politics. I’m on MeWe under my same name. I was on Parler as @monsterhunter45, though I never really used it, and I have no idea if that place is going to survive. I’ll be looking into other alternatives as well.

##

So for the last few days I’ve avoided Facebook entirely (while the fan page on MeWe gained a couple thousand new members), and I had three of the most productive writing days I’ve had in months. Then last night I checked my FB feed for a few minutes to see what I missed..

Very first notification, some random crazy stranger had tagged me in a post screaming at me about Sad Puppies (which was like 6 years ago) and how I was a crybaby loser, and something about QAnon(?). Beats me. I just instablocked and kept scrolling.

There were probably a bunch of other random assholes tagging me to scream at me (there always are) but I didn’t scroll through the notifications far enough to tell. (random nobodies always feel the need to “call me out” for some inexplicable reason, and I’m like dude, George Martin at the height of his fame “called me out” for 40,000 words of sanctimonious blog posts and it didn’t do shit. Who are you?)

So then I scrolled through my feed. There was lots and lots of links to Proper Media and gloating and virtue signaling about the end of our “national nightmare” by total strangers which I’m being shown for some baffling reason. Then there were posts by my actual friends, only anything they said which deviated from leftist orthodoxy usually had comments from angry self-righteous types trying to shame/browbeat/gaslight them into compliance.

And then the last post I read? Some local dude I friended years ago for reasons I can’t even remember posted a giant screed about how he was butt hurt and outraged because he walked into a blue collar automotive business, and some of the employees weren’t wearing masks. (GASP!) So he did his business in abject terror of looming death (he’s around my age) and immediately afterwards reported the business to their corporate headquarters and the state health department so those evil murderous (probably scraping by on just over minimum wage) employees could get fired and their (probably struggling) franchise owner could get fined into bankruptcy. Then all the comments were people telling this hero how stunning and brave he was.

At that point I closed the page, assured I was making the right call. Any loss of sales I get from no longer participating in that cesspool will more than be made up for by improvements to my mood. If leaving Facebook means that I’m going to be in a “right wing echo chamber” (as I’m continually warned by my co-dependent friends who have become accustomed to the endless abuse masquerading as “dialog”) so be it. That sounds splendid. ๐Ÿ˜€

January update post
Book Giveaway from seven different authors

104 thoughts on “a Farewell to Facebook”

  1. Congratulations on achieving escape velocity.

    Some of us nobodies who don’t create content effectively abandoned it long ago. The number of inactive users on that platform has got to be a huge portion of their user base. I’m still there, but never log on. I’ve never been censored or banned, but I quit going because it’s just a toxic hellhole in general.

    Their latest adventures as Orwellian contractors for the Uniparty might just be the nudge I need to delete the damn thing.

    1. Been there.
      Done that.
      MeWe’d a while back. Actually, I think it was due to a general suggestion from Larry.
      Haven’t regretted it.
      As for being in a “right wing echo chamber”, I’m constantly checking my biases on that. But it sure seems easier to spot the BS on those sites that it is dig out the truth on the mainstream sites.

  2. In a few months there will be stories about how social media, sports, and movies just aren’t doing well anymore.

    I think conservatives have had enough, if things that are optional in our lives keep telling us we’re evil and awful, we’re going to turn our back on them. If the mainstream culture doesn’t want us, it turns out we don’t want the either.

    1. In a few months there will be stories about how social media, sports, and movies just arenโ€™t doing well anymore.

      You do know that this is because of the pandemic, right? Or are you being willfully obtuse?

      1. Spolier: They won’t be coming back after the pandemic.

        Look, they can be watched on TV right now and their numbers (especially the NBAs) are down.

        My favorite baseball team went all in for social justice last year. I will never attend or watch or listen to another game.

        People will abandon a culture that openly HATES them.

        1. Sadly true. Baseball, right along with Sci-Fi and Fantasy, is one of my passions and I’ve been a lifelong Red Sox fan. I’ll never watch an MLB game again, televised or at a ballpark. We have a nice little ballpark that hosts a Collegiate Baseball League, and if they’re still functioning this spring and summer, they get my attention. Right up until they do some SJ initiative, then I’ll walk away from them too.

          No more money for people who hate me.

      2. “You do know that this is because of the pandemic, right? Or are you being willfully obtuse?”

        I actually had to read Blake’s other comments to make sure this is not meant to be sarcastic.

        Dude, the pandemic was an excuse for the mainstream media to take a melodramatic nosedive, after practically running on fumes and steadily going down for the past decade or so. Sports, prime time shows, even social networks have been losing attendance not because people are somehow too sick to tune in, but rather, because they’re sick and tired of what they’re tuning in to.

        The funniest thing is, even if the heretofore mainstream media decided to drop the wokeness altogether – which they only adopted to appease certain advertisers and vexatious litigators to begin with – the crowd still wouldn’t come back, having found alternatives, such as more independent social media and entertainment channels, and of course, books.

        Long story short, even if you (re)build it, they won’t come. And ironically, with the crowd leaving, so will the advertisers and litigators, the latter simply going off to look for another feeder to mooch off of, be it through “wokeness” or whatever other buzzword comes around.

      3. Sports franchises and Movieville were ALREADY dying. The sports franchises had pissed off too many of the long time fans and money spenders who buy season tickets with their woke shit. Hollywood makes a few decent movies a year, the rest are complete shit. Hell most of the stuff the awards gush about are complete shit. Frankly I hope a lot of the big multiplex chains choke to death on the complete lack of traffic. The smaller theatres, and dinner chains gain more ground and Drive Ins…make a huge comeback. Hell, the mall I worked at as a teenager is an eyesore. all the chains are gone, the only thing really keeping it alive is chain multiplex theater on one end of it. Bulldoze the fucker and put in a drive in, I’d be estatic. So in closing? The ‘pandemic’ or rather the blindingly stupid over reaction to it, were just the final nails in the coffins.

  3. I have an account on Facebook only to keep on you and your books and thoughts.

    Now to MeWe. I loved the spoilers, I need that book.

    1. I think I’ve finally realized the dystopian hell hole things are headed to. It isn’t 1984.

      Welcome to the world of Fareinheight 451.

        1. Oh, both of them. Plus Atlas Shrugged. Since they use them all as how-to manuals.

          Strange, I though that it was the neocon right and the alt-right who used that book and The Fountainhead to determine how society should be run. Or am I wrong?

          1. Just from skimming all your avalanche of dumbfuck posts this morning, I’d probably have to write a book to chronicle all the ways you are wrong.
            In a post about how I’m quitting FB because of the tiresome bullshit and random moron strangers, apparently this random moron stranger took that as an invitation to move his bullshit here.
            Nope. Life is too short.

      1. Welcome to the world of Fahrenheit 451.

        Welcome to a nation (and world) restored to sanity, with no more fascists and racists to run it and control it.

        1. lol, here we go. Blake, you know what the funniest bit is? Of course, you don’t. Well, I’ll tell you. You probably believe that shit. That’s not funny, not one bit funny, not at all. That’s FUCKING HYSTERICAL.

        2. If you really believe that you are beyond idiotic.

          The woke are satanic. Their anti-racist and anti-fascist bullshit is literally racist and fascist.

          If you count yourself among their number, repent or you’re going for eternal damnation.

  4. I deleted my Facebook account altogether.

    Social media was interesting ten, twelve years ago, when there were a bunch of different communities on which you could choose to have a presence or not. Facebook was around but wasn’t dominant. Twitter didn’t exist yet, I don’t think. MySpace was still big. There was Reddit, too, which still exists, but also Fark, tumblr, LiveJournal, the entire blogosphere (with hundreds of sub-genres), bulletin/message boards like The High Road and We The Armed (and there were a lot of these covering every imaginable topic), even things like Baen’s Bar.

    Over time it all got absorbed into the mass of Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. Sure, there are still blogs, Reddit is still a thing, tumblr still exists, but these things are comparatively inconsequential next to the big three. Facebook, Twitter, and Google control the narrative. They control the flow of information. Amazon is a little more behind the scenes, but as Parler discovered, they have a lot of power, too.

    The entire “World Wide Web” basically got funneled through a handful of huge corporations run by a cabal of weirdo billionaires, and the world is not better off because of it. If not for Facebook I probably would have gone my entire life without having my own crazy stalker ranting about how Ted Cruz is a secret Canadian infiltrator.

    I’m done with it, too. My online presence is going to be limited at best. Like you said, what you lose in sales you make up for in mental health.

    1. It’s been super hard to hold a Livejournal group together since FB reached adoption critical mass. Everybody followed the siren call of pretty pics and 10 second reads.

      I miss forums! Proper forums with organization and ease of finding topics.

        1. Yeah, we made a Dreamwidth mirror when LJ was bought, but nothing on LJ has changed except less and less people using it. At least in our experience.

  5. here’s hoping your move will prove fruitful! I for one look forward to your posts. There’s a reason that you can make money with words, people are willing to pay you for it, because you are so good at it.

  6. Larry, I hope I’m not being blind and missing it, but does this site have an RSS feed? I’m dusting off my feed reader and adding sites in so I can keep up, but can’t find one for yours.

  7. I’m currently writing a goodbye post and telling people they can find me on Gab, MeWe, and Parler (when it comes back up). Then I’m going to go full-on #MAGA and make Facebook ban me for having the audacity to say the election was stolen and censorship is bullshit (so controversial!).

    I’ve set up a Proton Mail account so I can move away from Gmail. I’m about to dump Verizon, though I’m not sure for what. I swore up and down after dealing with Deutsche Telekom when I was in Germany that I’d never give them another red cent and now I’m actually looking at moving to T-Mobile (one of DT’s companies) because so far they haven’t decided to virtue signal their wokeness. Or maybe I just missed it.

    I’m trying to order directly from companies instead of going through Amazon, even if it’s more expensive and takes longer to get here.

    And the minute I can get my hands on a reliable non-Android/non-Apple phone, I’m on it.

    1. puri.sm makes a security focused phone that does not use apple os or android. you can physically turn off the camera and microphone to prevent apps (like snapchat) from spying on you all day long.

      give them a look. the downside is I think they are backordered by more than a month right now.

    2. Yep. We’re starting to look at Patriot Mobile as an alternative to Vrrizon. I just found Proton. And have fun going MAGA.

    3. The owner of Gab (you should be on it) is in the midst of developing his own phone.

      Iโ€™ve been using Apple products since OS 6.7 (yeah. That long…) and you bet your a$$ Iโ€™m gonna take a good hard look at his device.

      Oh, and you really should get a Proton mail acct. I have one. If itโ€™s good enough for Project Veritas…

  8. Drops make up the ocean. You have many drops that look to you as a common sense, no b.s., call it as a you see it guyโ€™s guy! Hopefully, the gravitational pull of your exodus is akin to the moonโ€™s impact on tides and a tidal wave ensues that lessens the reach and power of entities that are proving that absolute power corrupts absolutely. Dan

  9. I completely agree. I just deleted my facebook account. I may go to another platform, I may not. We seem to be at the point with social media where the juice just isn’t worth the squeeze. I enjoy your books. Keep up the good work, and if you choose to keep fighting the good fight on MeWe or Gab or wherever, then good luck and God bless.

  10. I think I need to delete all non IRL friends and friends of friends. Get off the political pages and just use FB for keeping in touch with army buddies, old high school friends, and local garahe sale sites.

  11. I set up a MEWE account in 2018. My only complaint is/was the scarcity of content. It took some time but the official media is finally pushing a critical mass over. Who says they’re not good for something?

  12. I can’t completely disconnect from the FaceBorg, unfortunately, since my business page is there and I have to maintain it to communicate with customers.
    But I’m shifting all my social/personal activity to MeWe.

  13. In response to the stupid “right wing echo chamber” remark: I think it was the libertarian former-youtuber Lee Doren who pointed out that a leftist can go their whole life without being exposed to conservative media and philosophy in any meaningful amounts- it dominates our culture. Any right wing exposure is usually via the left’s filter and caricature. For a conservative, it is impossible to be removed from the left, and so they have to seek it out.

    As I recall, his own conversion from a community organizer to libertarian started by him daring to find out what the “evil racist Limbaugh” actually said while he drove around to get signatures to shut bad things down.

    1. My wording sucked: I meant so conservatives have to seek out conservative sources while still being exposed to leftist sources.

    2. I was just talking to a guy about how the left is being so terrible that they are creating a situation where their screeds must be ignored.

      It won’t be long until the electorate is utterly fractured.

      Now the right knows what the left is thinking. I think it will soon be neither side knows what the other is.

      Bill Maher of all people said something about this.

    3. Exactly. We’re the out-group, politically speaking. We may be the majority, but the left controls the levers of power, so we have no choice but to hear them. We couldn’t set up an echo chamber if we tried.

  14. Beware MeWe. They have announced (and ReclaimTheNet has echoed) that MeWe is not a free speech site, and in fact is banning “Stop the Steal” groups and their members.

    I recommend CloutHub instead.

    1. I recommend VKontakte/VK – it’s the Russian equivalent of Facebook. No doubt it’s monitored and censored, but the things they’re concerned about will all be focused on Russia, if you don’t talk about Putin’s Billions, human rights abuses in Russia, or Ukraine, you don’t need to worry about getting banned or drinking polonium Tea. It’s got full English language functionality and Apple or Android won’t ban it from their app stores because they want to continue to do business in Russia.

  15. Good job. I noticed the same when I got booted. More time and a better frame of mind let me get lots more farm work done. It seems to have lifted a brain fog even. Tell us where you are and we’ll follow…… you KNOW that. SotBS ROCKS!!

  16. Bravo. I was always a little peeved that you were on facebook, because I knew I was missing some content of yours. Never joined, glad I did not, glad I will still get good content on your blog. Write more books and I will buy them too! (have them all, cept special editions, man I tried to swing the cash for those)

  17. Get off Fakebook completely. Remove your Bookmark and block your browser from connecting to it EVER. And don’t bother with MeWe either. If it’s not already compromised, it soon will be. You already have your own platform here. Use it until a platform exists that is truly free speech. Mewe is not one. They took down any “Stop the Steal group among others. Stay far away,

  18. I shuttered my Facebook account on Jan. 15th and I haven’t missed it at all. MeWe is much more pleasant and I have yet to see any sign of these so-called “racist, Nazi, white supremacists” that the left has been screaming about running all over the place on that platform.

  19. Good moves, Larry.
    After having been an early Facebook adopter (thanks to the suggestion of my two avant-garde nieces) back in the days when MySpace had become dominant, and having been a strong advocate of it for years, I began my first step away from them just after the InstaGram acquisition, when FB updated their ToS to include language giving them nebulous rights to your own photos you post on your page. I decided then they were absolute scumbags unworthy of my patronage.
    Since then theyโ€™ve only gotten exceedingly worse, and hanging their bent political philosophies on their brown-shirt sleeves while trying to silence voices of those they disagree with.

    By now my page is on life support, and I hardly ever sign on to it. The only reason I keep it active is to sometimes keep in touch with remote family and friends who still insist on using it (some of whom to which I feel guilty for recommending FB to in the first place).

    Social media has been sucked up into a machine controlled by Big Tech oligarchโ€™s at the behest of Big Government extremists and operators for globalist interests. They want to close off the Internet superhighway and lock every citizen inside a toll-ridden urban hellhole they control. They hate a free Internet just as much as they hate every other inalienable right. I just wonโ€™t comply. โ€œI lost my iPad in a boating accident.โ€

  20. The sore winners don’t get it, the villains are still in charge, we just changed franchises. The nightmare isn’t over, we just have to face Jason now instead of Freddy.

    1. The sore winners donโ€™t get it, the villains are still in charge, we just changed franchises. The nightmare isnโ€™t over, we just have to face Jason now instead of Freddy.

      You and all of the other neocons have the gall to say that, especially after what you lot pulled in D.C. last week, and how you treated others when your lord and master Trump won four years ago; a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black.

      1. I don’t recall re-education camps and permanent black listing from any form of employment being brought up by even President Straw Trump. Seems like more genocide apologist retcons to me and what “we” pulled last week, we’ve been told murder and arson are political speech everytime some criminal scum bag gets sainted for however long it takes the facts to come out

        1. Blake reminds of a violent ex-girlfriend from my crazy single years: She was once convinced that I A) cheated on her and B) was going to beat her (Spoiler Alert: A) I didn’t cheat on her and B) It wouldn’t even makes sense to beat her, even if I had planned to, which I didn’t. And wouldn’t).

          So, what did she do?

          She cheated on me. And when I broke up with her after I found out she cheated, she attacked me with a screwdriver.

          Her excuse, after I called the police? (Because F@#k yeah, I called them)

          “I did it to him because I knew he was planning to do it top me.”

          That’s the Leftist mindset for you.

      2. What’s wrong, kid? Angry that we did better than you at keeping buildings intact when we showed up to protest?

    2. …the villains are still in charge, we just changed franchises…

      Well, whoever is in charge, it sure ain’t the guy who, when prompted to salute the marines by his earpiece, literally said the phrase “salute the marines”, rather than actually doing it. But also, as I noticed, who wasn’t saluted by said marines. Whose motorcade was rather demonstratively snubbed by the national guardsmen it passed by. Whose cronies had the gall to disarm and vet said guardsmen for their “political leanings”, lest they threaten his fragile existence.

      Really, what is going on in the military right now? Sorry, I don’t have a better place to ask, but our host having been a military contractor, and this place attracting a like-minded crowd, I figure it’s worth a shot. So… what’s up? From what I can tell, troop deployments in D.C. are increasing, the West Coast is being patrolled by a growing fleet of ships, and the airspace is swarming with anything from Hueys to airborne command centers (as seen on adsbexchange, for what that’s worth), the other day there was even a U2 doing high-altitude patrols over California. Something tells me it’s not up there to skywrite messages of peace and unity.

      Since I’d never taken that much of an interest in in-country military movement, does any of this seem strange to you guys, or is it mostly business as usual? Sans the impromptu occupation of D.C., of course.

      1. Given the JCS letter calling the Joke in the Rotunda an “insurrection” and the FBI warning of an uprising in all 50 states that never materialized, I’m going with Hair-on-Fire Incompetence all the way to the top.

        I came for the insurrection and all I got was this lousy t-shirt.

  21. It’s been so long since I logged on to FB that I’ve forgotten my password. I couldn’t log on now even if I wanted, and I don’t. I probably missed some fun interaction with authors I really like, but I avoided a lot of BS too, so it’s a net gain. In any case, welcome to the FB free world.

  22. I would bet 90 – 95% of the people using FB or twitter could close their account tomorrow and never experience one iota of ill effect. I closed mine 5 years ago and haven’t regretted that decision for even a second. My wife still had an account up until they banned DJT, at which point she said screw this, I’m done with it. The only reason she had it was to keep in touch with family. I always told her to use your damn phone and call them. Social media sites are as bad as a drug addiction. I understand where Larry is coming from regarding businesses using FB. For some that’s all they have. But to that I say if they are really a fan or a customer they will follow you wherever you go. Every person using FB and twitter is a revenue generator for them. They need you way more than you need them. And they aren’t doing a very good job of keeping users / customers happy. And that’s a business model that will drive the death of the business in the long run.

    1. My wife still had an account up until they banned DJT, at which point she said screw this, Iโ€™m done with it.

      Trump was banned from Twitter for inciting a riot by his slaves/acolytes; they’re a private platform, and they don’t have to ‘respect’ his free speech. What part of that didn’t you and the other neocons get?

      1. Odd, even the (D) run press has walked back from that claim. If you are just going to repeat (D) talking points, you might want to actually check that you have the latest list before mindlessly copying the old one.

      2. > theyโ€™re a private platform

        The most amusing part of this whole thing is watching communists suddenly turning into Ayn Rand with respect to the right of “private platforms” that offer services to the general public to engage in arbitrary discrimination.

        You don’t even believe your own bullshit, hoss. Don’t expect anyone else to believe it.

        1. Let’s put it this way: Louis B. Mayer, a private businessman, decided that he wasn’t going to buy any more scripts from communist screenwriters. Okay by you, or nah?

          We’ve all grown up being told that the “Hollywood Blacklist” was the Worst Thing Ever (even though Stalin, Mao, and all their shitty little buddies were literally murdering millions at the same time), but now you’re saying that was okay. Right?

          Got it. Filed for future reference.

      3. Funny. The Tweets from POTUS DJT that were deleted by Twitter did the exact opposite of your claim.

        Instead, POTUS DJT used Twitter to *denounce* violence and rioting and he implored the people to go home *peacefully*. Twitter locked his account and deleted the Tweets. There are screenshots, by the way, if you wanted to look for them. Twitter lied about what he said and then deleted the Tweets so people couldn’t read what he said (Pretty convenient for Twitter, huh?) and then prevented him from defending himself on their platform. Then their Social Media comrades and MSM made sure to back them up.

        Nice Kafka Trap, they had there:

        “Trump won’t denounce the violence!!”
        [Narrator voice: Twitter and Facebook have locked the president’s accounts)
        “When will he denounce the violence?”
        [Narrator voice: Trump denounced the violence, just like he did regarding Charlottesville, even though they claim he didn’t.]

        You’re either ignorant of that or you’re a liar, Blake. Which is it?

      4. What part of “jbs and his wife made a personal decision to get off of social media” gave you such a hard time?

        Points for mindless use of “neocon” though. Lefty, is that you?

  23. Congratulations! Reducing one’s bullshit consumption is always a good thing. Breathe free and smile!

    My (tiny compared to yours) blog has been fine for a decade without the inbred nattering Borg-lite of social media. The best part of finding/building my own presence is that 99.9% of my blog comments are positive. I get well reasoned ideas posted by nice people. I moderate less than 1 in 1000 comments. Often, I learn something new. Even people who disagree with me have a polite and intelligent reason for doing so.

    Limiting ones internet presence to actual thinking adults is a ray of sunshine; like living in a pleasant small town instead of a zombie infested Calcutta slum. Where we got the idea that we should tolerate (or welcome) shrieking misfits is a mystery to me.

    Good luck with MeWe. In due time MeWe will be converged. Most organizations eventually fall to the hive mind. Gab may or may not. As for Facebook, their fate is already obvious. In one or five years they’ll start requesting a Federal handout. In due time they’ll be forgotten. Their core user demographic is already somewhere between Boomer and dead. Their business model is oriented to the sweet spot between midwit and brain damaged. Facebook will be the next Myspace or Yahoo.

    Meanwhile, creators will continue to create, and that will be of value regardless of delivery venue. Even if creators ship MicroSDs via carrier pigeon, the story is what matters. Now you can write things that REALLY piss ’em off. I can’t wait!

  24. I haven’t signed on to Dronepages since November ’19 when a close friend posted a long screed demanding that all the horrible conservative friends un-friend him immediately. I had know him for nearly 40 years. I signed off and have not been back on since.

    I need to go back one final time to delete my contact and leave contact info for the old friends I lost touch with and found on the Book of Faceless.

    Glad to read you will finally be posting in a place I don’t feel alienated from the instant I sign on and look forward to joining your pages on the new forums.

  25. Glad to hear you are reducing your stress level. I’ve always chosen to follow you on your blog. I have a Facebook account that I use to get in touch with the handful of friends that haven’t given me their email addresses. I can’t tell you the last time I posted anything on there other than a birthday greeting.

  26. Good for you, Larry.
    I hope you and your crew find better digs. The hell of Alt Tech is that at has ample space for political crime thinkers and that’s awesome … but it needs to be more than that. They need a space where guys like you can push your books, or banter with the family or do the other fun stuff.

  27. Deleted facebook as well. I’ve found Mewe to be nearly unusable, at least on my phone, and like Gab a lot more. Hopefully we can see you there too.

  28. I hope one day we can get back to a point where people on either side of the political spectrum can co-exist. I think the first step for that is leaving behind social media. It just gives such a larger platform to extremist voices on both sides then they would normally deserve or have. I’m a leftist and I might have disagreements with any of you about policies and what a good government does, but I don’t hate any of you either.

    1. That ship has sailed. The value systems between Left and Right are far too divergent now. That’s why the social fabric is quickly unraveling. There’s going to be a party split on the Right soon, followed by one on the Left. It was going to happen with or without Trump.

      The center didn’t hold.

      1. What center? Half the country honestly believes in socialism and/or communism. They champion womenโ€™s โ€œrightsโ€ but believe men with mental problems should be allowed to compete with and dominate women in sports. Here in Minneapolis, a POC pistol whipped and shot an elderly woman to steal her rent money, was given $50k bond, and was promptly bailed out by the celebrity action fund. Thereโ€™s so much crazy to unpack, thereโ€™s no point in trying.

    2. Love and hate have nothing to do with it.

      Loving one’s enemies is perfectly compatible with efficiently killing them when peaceful coexistence is not possible.

      The right is an aggregate around the religious values of Christianity. The left is an aggregate around the religious values of the heresy of Christianity that was the state cult of the Soviet Union.

      War is not the exception, peace is the exception, and every peace had conditions which permitted it to exist.

      As long as the left was weak and a small minority, peaceful coexistence was possible within the same society and culture. The culture and society could coast on values that were more or less Christian, and function stably and peacefully.

      Now that the left has gained numbers and apparent power, that no longer holds. When not bound to mores based in Christian values, leftists are not capable of peaceful coexistence. The history of the Soviet Union was low level internal conflict interspersed with periods of intense internal warfare.

      Social media and the internet was end of the dominance of centrally controlled media, and centrally controlled media permitted the left to pretend to greater advantage than it had. Facebook, Twitter, and Google tried to restore centralization, have failed, and in failing have done serious damage to the illusion of parity.

      If peace and coexistence occur again, it will be only be if the left is weak enough that it can be destroyed as a culture. Otherwise, the conflict will carve some pretty lasting grudges.

    3. Leaving behind social media is one thing; it’s already been going down anyway. I suspect the next step would be for people to maintain multiple accounts on several channels, with as little personal information as possible, rather than the unified virtual avatars of today.

      More important, however, is the step away from, and ultimately against, the use of social media for facilitating one-sided narratives and character assassinations – which you gotta admit has become the trademark of the radical left. You cannot expect coexistence when you tolerate a culture where accusation is treated as incontrovertible proof, while any voice of skepticism or dissent is silenced or outright punished, bearing guilt by association. And vice-versa, where any infarction by the “right” side (in this case, the left side) is ignored or justified with ever more dubious excuses.

      Speaking from experience, that’s how communist regimes worked in practice – there were a ton of rules, literally impossible to follow in full, but only enforced at the party’s convenience. Guilt is universal, but punishment is arbitrary.

      I think you’ll find this out for yourself, the next time you try to argue for peace and reconciliation with your own side – you’ll either get sent straight to the doghouse, or forced to “apologize”, and have this lapse into wrongthink brought up for any other disagreement, political or otherwise. But hey, at least you’ll be on the right side of history… just like communism was, before it suddenly wasn’t.

  29. I always preferred forums. All the self-pub writer groups are on FB, though, so I’m stuck there.

    I’m still part of a romance writers forum that’s almost a ghost town even though it has thousands of members. Most of the admins and moderators stopped posting and you only see them on FB nowadays, so it’s only a matter of time before it’s a dead archive. I hope the owner keeps paying the maintenance fees a while longer.

    As a small-time writer, it’s been really hard to get people to sign up for the newsletter. They’d rather follow on social media, though that literally means follow and never clicking “like”. Newsletter is the only thing we own, but getting people to read e-mail? Industry standard is a 25% open rate! And of course, 99% of the make-money advice is using FB and Amazon ads to get eyeballs. I still have the badge of honor of not succumbing to those dollar sucks.

    Always knew Big Tech were all the things we know, but having to give them a percentage of my income as part of selling books really feels dirty now. We used to just curse at Amazon, but after what Google and Apple did to Parler, ugh.

    Can’t only distribute ebooks to B&N, though. 2021 needs to stop sucking.

  30. my friends and relatives continue to post pro-trump stuff on facebook. a lot of it is from the russian troll factory or qanon quality stuff. they’ve never tried to shoot up a pizza place, but a few of them might if it was reported to be nearby. so far they have never been censored by facebook.

    1. Well golly, if ryan’s friends haven’t been banned, then I guess it just isn’t happening and it’s all a conspiracy theory.

  31. Excellent decision, Mr. Correia. I still have a FB account but I haven’t logged in since around 2014-2015, I think. FB has been toxic for a long time, and that’s without the Stasi-like information control and censorship. I’m kind of done with social media so I think it’s unlikely that I’ll try MeWe but I’ll definitely be reading anything you write here and of course your excellent books. Speaking of which…not to be pushy or anything (yeah, right, who am I fooling?) when is the next installment of Ashok’s saga due? The way you ended Book Three has me on the seat of my chair in anticipation. I can’t wait!

  32. Good luck, Larry. And please keep it up; yours is a voice of reason that needs to be heard. (In this age of massive gaslighting about election fraud, we NEED a combat accountant! Who’d a thunk it?)

    You were gracious enough to custom autograph a hardcover of Monster Hunter 5 for my then-teenager. She’s now almost 21, and still talks about it. Right now I’m reading the Grimnoir series to my 10 and 12 year old boys, and they can’t get enough of it. I smile to myself every time you sneak in a subtle libertarian reference… you corrupter of our nation’s youth, you. My boys don’t see it yet (although they will – they read the Tuttle Twins too). For now they just soak it all in, which is fine with me.

    I thought I sent you a picture back in the day. If you don’t have it, and would enjoy a pic of a teenaged girl SQUEEEING over you dedicating a book to Zoe “point blank” (complete with illustration), let me know and I’ll dig it out for you.

  33. Deleted my FB account March of 2017, after FB made it clear that it was an arm of the Democrat party.

    For those who are deleting your account, make sure you delete all Facebook cookies out of your browser cache. Facebook used to give their little white “F” button to website owners to put on their page, and that came in the form of java script, and said java script would interact with your account cookies in your cache and send home what page you were on to the FB mother ship. Every page you went to with that “F” button, it phoned home.

    They got busted for doing that a while back, and said they wouldn’t do it anymore, but who knows if they did.

    One other thing to realize is that every one of your friends and family that have used the mobile Facebook app have had their contact list and address book scraped, so even after you delete your account, you will still have one on their servers regardless.

  34. Thanks for lasting as long as you did Larry. And for always interacting with us. I’m sorry it has come to this.

  35. Have to be honest. I’m going to miss your voice on FB.

    I fully understand your decision, but the diversity of opinion is now less than before.

    There again, you don’t owe me or anyone else anything.

    All the best my friend.

  36. Cute questionnaire on your MeWe page – to join – and I’m thinking I answered correctly. Yay Me! ๐Ÿ˜€

    This site is not as ‘user-friendly’ as FB used to be, so I’m STILL getting comfortable. We’ll see. How long until the Tech Behemoths try to destroy it? Dunno.

    Welcome aboard, Sir!

  37. I dropped Facebook a couple years ago and just signed up for MeWe, going to try and get others as well. Thanks for the info Larry.

  38. I left fecesbook on November 30, last year.
    The a(lgorithm)-holes there required I wait thirty days and so, on December 30, my account finally went dark forever.
    Actually two accounts.
    Now my email is no longer inundated with cat pictures from all my “friends” and their diabetic desert recipes.
    I am also no longer reminded to send “birthday greetings” to real friends who died years ago.
    What a relief.

  39. I gave up on FailBook a few months ago too. For me, it was the seeming triviality of the new interface, where everyone who commented on it hated it. I realized we were being trained to yell, scream, whine, but then always go along.

    Despite whatever they say, the Left believes in censorship, and will try to suppress us Righties. All of us need to leave FacePalm.

  40. I closed mine permanently a week ago, but it had already been temporarily closed for several months. As I stepped away from FB and Twitter I thought about what life was like without them….

    I remember having actual friends, who I called or wrote to when I wanted to talk. Friends with whom I could disagree, but would never resort to name calling and shouting. Before Twitter I spoke to others in conversations rather than soundbites. Before social media (and its early Internet precursors) I never recall yelling at or being yelled at by someone with whom I had no personal relationship, except maybe in elementary school and if it happened then some good teacher would make us stop and make up to each other… with a handshake and a friendly word. And I remember not feeling nearly as divided from other Americans and from people around the world as I have felt under the oppression of social media.

    I enjoy the access to information that the Internet provides, but as a medium for opinion it is destructive to the soul. So I’m enjoying my return to a place of sanity and the time to focus on what is important to me, my family, and my community.

    I don’t know that I’ll ever return to any form of social media. I’ll dabble in media, although selectively, and I will certainly have a social life, but I am not going to mix them again. It has not been positive.

    Stay free.

  41. Well, yeah, all of social media is trash. Facebook is just one data point in a giant burning trash pile.

    On a separate note, if I came to a “blue collar automotive business” where employees weren’t wearing masks, I wouldn’t make Facebook posts or calls to government agencies about it. I’d just tell them that, unfortunately, I can’t patronize their business anymore until the pandemic is over, or they start wearing masks, whichever comes first. I’d tell my friends about them, too.

    This is not because I am an evil liberal who wants to take away regular working folks’ rights with my massive government power; it’s because I’m an old overweight guy with a heart condition, who had already lost relatives to COVID-19, and is trying to reduce his chances of dying (or losing more relatives) as much as possible. If that makes me an evil monster, well, so be it, it’s not my job to make anyone feel good.

    1. You are much more likely to die of a heart attack, stroke, or cancer. COVID19 is not even in the top 10 causes of death โ€” unless you believe all those reports of people who ‘died of coronavirus’ SIX MONTHS after recovering from a mild case.

      Like the ones in Washington that were basically, ‘Ignore the bullet and knife holes, they died of COVID19, really!’

      How many times do they have to lie before you stop believing them?
      โ€”โ€”โ€”โ€”โ€”โ€”โ€”โ€”โ€”โ€”โ€”
      Not everybody should go to college. Some folks, you send ’em to college and you just wind up with an educated idiot.

      1. As I said, I’ve seen a relative and more than one acquaintance die of COVID; trust me, I’m pretty sure they weren’t full of bullet holes at the time. These are not “reports” to me, but real people.

        Moving on, you are absolutely correct in saying that COVID-19 is not in the top 10 causes of death… for someone who is young and healthy. But the problem with fat sickly people like me is that COVID puts extreme stress on our systems. For example, I personally could live a long and fairly normal life, as long as I control my heart condition with daily medication and a bit of exercise. My parents take insulin daily, and so they would normally live to be 85, even with their diabetes. But with COVID, our chances of survival are about 20%, give or take 10%.

        This is not the case for everyone, and is certainly not the case for young and healthy people such as yourself. Congratulations ! And if your argument is, “well, sick people get sick, it’s not my problem”, then, rationally speaking, I understand. However, don’t pretend like the problem does not exist, that’s just dishonest.

      2. In my state about 20% of people over 80 who get COVID die. The numbers drop off abruptly as age goes down. That said, only 5.5% of the cases occur in that age group, but they account for 66% of the deaths. Unlike flu, the young do not die from it. How many actual flu cases are being called COVID? We’ll never really know. That said, for those with predisposing conditions, taking precautions may be wise, assuming those precautions actually work.

    2. Bugmaster, I want to go on record saying that this is the first comment of yours that I’ve found completely unobjectionable.

  42. ILoH,
    You’re being speciesist. “…like abused trailer park wives…”
    Everyone knows Elves would never abuse their wives! She’d sit on the poor Elf and crush him!

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