Re-evaluate at a year.
I’ve been writing a blog for a year now. I took two days off this week; it occurred to me that I didn’t set “days off” for my “job” of writing on my blog. The days off were Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, reasonable times to not write, I felt. I don’t have any staff or assistants and I don’t have a bunch of posts lined up to post; the most I’ve ever got ahead in writing has been almost a week. As soon as I had a week of posts scheduled on the blog, I took that time to not write on my blog and instead do other things. Sort of a vacation, though I didn’t travel. I did errands, housework, time with children, and completed a 14-hour computer game (Jedi Survivor) for the second time.
My initial goal was to get myself into writing and posting online, consistently. When my husband died, I signed up for a writing master class online, so I could get myself to write and so I’d have something substantial to say to concerned people who asked me, “What will you do now?” The master class was led by Malcolm Gladwell, a non-fiction writer I very much enjoy, who writes about ideas and people in an engaging and thoughtful way. I didn’t do very many of the exercises he set out, but I did write. A lot.
Most of my writing that first year post-husband was in my journal and on Facebook. I made a habit of checking Facebook nearly every day, commenting on other people’s posts and answering homeschooling questions in local homeschool groups. For several years that worked pretty well. I discovered I was writing some pretty long, involved posts. I also discovered I was repeating myself; questions repeated on homeschool pages. Some parents really enjoyed and even looked for my posts on homeschooling topics. People told me to write a book.
My personal life was busy; I graduated two children from homeschool during those years and this coming summer I will graduate the last. Talk therapy, medications, and learning about ADHD, autism, and depression, have all taken their toll. My children are currently doing well, but it has taken a lot of time and effort to reach this point. My physical health has suffered. There’s still life insurance money saved, but it’s draining away. Rather than get a job, I started a blog with an eye to taking a year’s worth of posts, potentially combining them into a book. First I needed a year’s worth of posts, so I started there.
I continued writing on Facebook; it was good. Some people have come to my blog from there. A few posts have been posted in both places, usually with good results. Good in this case means people read them and commented positively, sometimes with interesting information. I thought about establishing a comment function for my blog, but realized that without an assistant to keep an eye on it, I’d have to moderate it myself. There was no spare energy for that, so I didn’t.
In the meantime, the online landscape shifted. Like a kaleidoscope, everything has moved and reshuffled. Facebook is still a good place to post comments and connect to people physically near and far; I can see what friends post about their lives. Facebook’s Messenger app is a good alternative to text messages, for when you’re connected on Facebook but not by phone number. It’s faster than email. Occasionally someone will send me a Messenger message without being connected through Facebook; seeing their Facebook profile gives me more information about them, which I like knowing.
On the other hand, Facebook’s parent, Meta, is pushing AI hard. Messenger went so far as to ask if I wanted to use AI generated stickers as comments in my messages, putting the AI options at the top. Consequently I stopped using stickers in messages; I didn’t like the examples shown and I was NOT going to go to the work to have the AI create more. I would feel obligated to vet whatever the AI created before I could use it. That’s too much work.
Squarespace, the hosting company that maintains the software backend of my blog, offers to write posts for me, using AI, but they’re not in my face about it. There’s a set of three tiny bubbles that wiggle when I mouse over them, but otherwise they’re no more in the way than the row of other formatting tools they’re next to: Paragraph, Bold, Italic, list format, font size, delete. I don’t use the AI option, that’s all.
Of more concern is a change to Facebook’s algorithm. Now instead of a steady diet of posts from friends interspersed with a few sponsored or recommended posts, I get three or four posts from friends followed by a steady stream of recommended posts from Facebook groups or organizations or public figures. After several recommended posts, there will be one or two more from friends, then another block of recommended posts. Periodically Facebook asks a question: do you want to see more posts like this? Yes or No buttons are right there, and if you press yes, Facebook will say, “Okay, you will see more posts like this for a while.” No length of time for “a while”. I wonder about that, especially since I’m going on Facebook almost every day and I get asked that every day. The groups and organizations being recommended are, I think, based on whether the algorithm thinks I will like them and therefore read them, hence feeding the algorithm more information on what interests me specifically and people like me generally. By reading and “liking” good media, I’m helping to “reduce world suck” as the vlogbrothers used to say, but it feels very curated and separated from any notion of actually helping anyone other than Meta. Public figures in this context are people who are using Facebook to post their blog posts, with pictures. The algorithm tends to recommend posts with pictures more than posts without, because more people read them after seeing the picture. People posting questions in groups therefore often add a picture of their cat or their dog or something cute or funny, as a “picture tax”, so people will read their question and hopefully respond. After all, people can’t respond to a question that doesn’t get read and responded to enough to get the algorithm to push it out to more people to get more responses…
It’s a crazy system, built like an AI version of a shipwreck, in some ways worse than early internet without Google search. Every search on Google now comes with an AI overview of results at the top. I routinely skip over the overview, since I don’t trust the AI. There’s already evidence that AI overviews of product reviews on Amazon are not always reliable. I’d rather sort through people’s actual reviews, at least a few of them. It bothers me to have the truth, already obscured under layers of obfuscation, made that much harder to sort out.
I don’t want to live in a world where no one trusts anyone else. There must be a way to ensure… well… I’m writing this myself. Maybe AI even helped you find my page. If so, thank you for coming. But you’re taking your life in your hands.
