Let me be clear about this before I disappear down the rabbit hole of surrendering to my usual sarcastic rant refuge. I usually rave about how certain services providers involved in modern life seem to take perverse pleasure in making joy such an elusive goal. Guess what – I’m doing it again – being angry gets addictive.
I like Facebook. I’m old and set in my ways. I’ll put up with anti vaxxers, naturapath loonies, Greenpeace, invitations to join in the merry-go round of multi-level marketing, begging for a cabbage or a mule for someone’s online farm and assorted pictures of babies who look like Winston Churchill. Hell, I even find myself reading about vegans and thinking they might have point.
However.
All I want is to chat to a couple of friends, envy their lifestyles and simply bask in the reflected pixel glow of knowing that there is a world where people work in businesses where underwear is the default choice for business attire. I’m a simple man – under dressed possibly, but simple.
But for your amusement let me tell you that life tends to change when you embark on an ad campaign on Facebook. It changes in the same way as it would change if you had to beg a small child to put the safety pin back into a grenade.Very soon you will realise that you are not dealing with an entirely rational player.
Let’s take a trip back in my patent pending ‘WayBack Device’ (stay with me).
In the days when beating the living snot out of a boychild if they transgressed certain boundaries was in fashion, you might come home from school and have this rather surreal conversation as you walked through the door.
Mother: ‘Wait until your Father gets home!’
You (hopefully): ‘Sweeties?’
Mother: ‘You know what you did!’
You: ‘Seriously, I don’t.’
Mother: ‘You just wait!’
You (wailing): ‘But I don’t know!’
Now aside from the fact that this was a serious betrayal of any sort of even marginally functional justice system – you know that your ass is going to be hurting when you get to the dinner table. If you get any dinner.
This is advertising on Facebook.
Everything is going along fine and dandy until the ad campaign just stops. And you have no idea why. So, you fill in a form which asks you everything except your blood type and then you submit that in the (marginal) hope that all will be well.
It never is.
You get a message along these lines:
‘Our records indicate that your payments account was disabled because it violates Facebook’s terms of service. In the interest of protecting our users, we cannot confidently re-enable your payments account at this time.’
‘Thanks for your understanding’
Now any person who has not been active on a pogo stick underneath a ceiling fan would realise that there are a few problems here.
I wouldn’t mind a little bit more information about the specific term of service that I have violated. Just throw the dog a bone. Just a clue so that I can rectify the problem.
‘in the interests of protecting our users.’
I am the user you knuckle dragging festering swamp twats. I would have let you know if there was a problem.
‘we cannot confidently etc etc’
Just tell me what the issue is, and I’ll fix it – I beg of you.
And the absolute best passive aggressive statement I have ever read.
‘Thank you for your understanding.’
Let’s be clear. I don’t understand, I cannot understand, I am not psychic.
This is the same mentality of that used by those who design website logins.
‘Username or password incorrect.’
Just tell me which one is incorrect – I am on my knees.
This is a sign of things to come. And I have said it before. We are becoming slaves to forms. It makes no difference to companies social media sites.
They have become so powerful that they honestly believe that they can send out automated responses – form letters. They are consistently vague so that they have some ‘plausible deniability’.
‘We told him!’
But – and it’s a big but (I cannot lie) the time is rapidly approaching when the sheer avarice of these social media companies will become self-defeating.
They are throwing up hurdle after hurdle in order to limit the activities of small business – no matter how active those businesses are. They want the big fish. The reason is simple. When it all goes to hell (and it will) they will have formed such a close relationship with the marketing departments of huge brands that they know – we sink or swim together.
As far as security is concerned Facebook and its fellow travelers have already been badly burned. Now they are gun shy. And they have metamorphised (or metastasised possibly more accurately) into something far more dangerous than a simple company, they are now actively suppressing entrepreneurship.
For a company that thrived on baby photos – they are now throwing aspirant business people out with the bathwater.
And mark my words. You will be asked to pay for their services at some point in the future. They will split free and paid into two separate markets – and that will be the death knell of that company.
Rant over – have a great weekend folk. And don’t be like Steve – enjoy and don’t be upset.
The Picking Ground. 