Why I am slowly ditching Facebook for LinkedIn

ditching Facebook

Two social media platforms have proved unusable for me – Twitter and Instagram. What the two have in common is that you don’t have to have a mutual connection with another person in order to engage in communication. Both of these social media platforms only require you to follow those you find interesting, and they aren’t required to follow you back. If you are one of the boring people like me, you will hardly find sufficient followers in return to read your updates or even engage you in discussions. And that’s why I have been a Facebook guy since I joined the platform back in 2007 – but now I am ditching Facebook for LinkedIn.

When I joined Facebook up to very recently, the platform has proven to be very important for my social connections. I not only used it to make new friends, but I also used it to launch my photography career, which started to pick up until I abandoned it for filmmaking mid this year. The best part of Facebook is that I even used it to get a wife simply by telling her I liked the photo of her lips (the upper ones of course). Then two, actually three, things happened. 1. Millenials joined Facebook. 2. Zuckerberg started playing around with the News Feed algorithms, and 3. Any other thing that may be pushing you away from Facebook. The culmination of the three things meant Facebook became so boring until it is now unbearable.

Millennials brought to the platform the xx talk where they replace almost all Ses with Xes, stupid gossips, and uncouth behaviour like the ifikie wazazi type of content. Zuckerberg’s news feed algorithms, on the other hand, made sure that I do not see as many updates as possible. Initially when someone’s Facebook was referred to as a Wall, and a few months/years after it changed to Timeline, the Facebook newsfeed was chronologically sorted by time. A person could, however, decide to sort his/her newsfeed by most popular. Today we have a different story – a story in which a number of Facebook algorithm decide for you what you may likely find interesting. Kachwanya put it better when he explained to me why he doesn’t find Facebook as interesting as it should be, ” I just hate the algorithm which decides what to show you. I liked FB when it used to be first come first served … when the timeline used to flow naturally and not some computer somewhere deciding that I should only see some content and not others”.

The algorithms have gone ahead to make sure you hardly see anything from the numerous Facebook Pages that you have liked. For example, I am an admin of a number of Facebook Pages, one with as many likes as 100, and another with as many likes as 18,000. Interestingly though, the page with 18,000 likes hardly get over 100 views on an update, compared to the one with about 100 likes that can get as many as 50 views on an update. The argument for this anomaly has been reasoned that Facebook wants you to pay before your Facebook page updates can reach other Facebook users.

These problems with Facebook have made me make up my mind to ditch the social media platform and opt for LinkedIn. Although LinkedIn isn’t a social media platform for social talk as such, it is the one place where the millennials haven’t invaded with their stupid gossip talks and sex-themed pictures. Being a platform for professionals, any serious human being will find posts on LinkedIn mentally enriching and thought-provoking. The beauty of LinkedIn is that it hasn’t gone the Facebook way to show you the same update every time you log back to the site or disappear an update from your newsfeed simply because you have refreshed it. If you refresh Facebook at any time, scrolling down won’t necessarily take you the last update you were enjoying. Most times after refreshing a Facebook newsfeed (which happens automatically by the way), you’d be forced to visit the timeline of the person or page who posted it in order to see the other part of the update that you hadn’t read. With LinkedIn, since the updates are chronologically sorted arranged and sorted by most recent, all you got to do is to scroll down a few updates and you will get back to the update you were at before refreshing the page.

Odipo Riaga2215 Posts

Film Director, Tech and Business Blogger, Chess Player, and Photographer. God is Science.

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