Leaving this mortal coil

You won’t have me to kick around anymore

You reach a point were you realize the struggle is useless. That you can’t fight the ocean.

You reach a point where continuing on is an exercise in futility.

Perhaps those first two sentences lead you to think I was considering suicide. No, (well …I am, but I consider that every time I sit down at my drawing table, so nothing new there) That was just a dirty trick to get you to click off of FB and onto this blog. See, the title and image and the first sentence or two is what shows up when you share something on FB.

Don’t give me the finger, you knew I was an unscrupulous jackass, it’s part of my charm, it’s why you love me .

At least I didn’t say “this will blow your mind” or “no.11 shocked me”, or the other tactics of clickbait websites promising insight or entertainment and only giving pop up window after pop up window of crap/ads/other clickbait.

Stop for a moment…isn’t this nice? There ain’t 4000 images here luring you into a wormhole of crap you didn’t need to know or see or hear. Just you and a gen-you-wine comedy writer, talking turkey, saying what’s what. A real person communicating a specific string of ideas that are currently on his mind, instead of cookie cutter article written to capitalize on whatever is trending. It’s almost like I give a damn ain’t it? Like you reading it matters in some way. Like it wasn’t just written in a way as to be understood equally vapidly by you, a plumber in Vermont, or a kid in Taiwan who never heard of me, like it wasn’t just written long enough to hold your interest until the imbedded ad can start playing.

We’ve had all sorts of trouble with the website the past couple of months and had to do a lot of work on the backend…when I say “we” I mostly mean Joe. I gave it an honest effort but I don’t know squat about html code or php code or whatever the hell code we use, so I was basically a four year old holding the flashlight while Dad works on the fuse box. I did happen to relearn how to look at the web statistics. The more I looked at them…the less inclined I felt to post amusing things on FB….

You may have noticed that less and less I have been posting complaints about my neighbors, or what annoyed me at the store…weekly rants like “double coupon day” which were filthy, xrated juxtapositions between getting double the value on coupons and defiling virgins, or the walking dead spoilers, have fallen by the wayside, and here is why- It was benefiting me not one iota.

I write comedy for a living …I was not getting paid for providing content on FB. The common wisdom is that you can use FB to promote yourself. That perhaps used to be true…but with people under 30 leaving FB in droves ( whatever number of them are even left) and the algorithm filling out newsfeeds with “trending topics”, trying to grow your business and promote your intellectual property on FB is like trying to grow a python in a garden hose.

Here’s some stats from EDGERANK CHECKER, one of several Stat companies that have all come up with similar statistics…

FBstats3

 

Those trends have been continuing for some time…and they appear to not be changing direction anytime soon.  

A dire situation eh?  Not really.  Our own website traffic/ statistics that I was looking at while Joe was actually fixing things…here’s what I learned-The traffic to our website is continuing to grow, and almost none of it is thanks to FB. The online store for example ( the online outlet we have to generate actual revenue) gets 8% of its traffic from FB. EIGHT…PERCENT. All Christmas season I was beating the sh*t out of my newsfeed promoting the online store…8%. All the rest came from elsewhere.  It’s safe to assume that of that 8% , 7.99999% would have heard about the sale through any number of other outlets we use to keep fans informed without the posting on FB.

The podcast page showed…some modest growth ( which is odd considering our almost complete neglect of that page in the last nine months) …almost none of THAT was from FB.  The FB page for the podcasts…I am on it only about three times a month, and yet that hasn’t stunted it’s growth. People go on FB to piss each other off about politics, or current events and occasionally tell their friends they got a new job or a divorce. They go on FB…and they stay on FB, and clicking off of it onto some other site, is to them, like going into some scary cave.

Me going on there helps one entity …FB. Anything I post is a stop-gap against people becoming completely bored with their newsfeeds and logging off. Think about the billions of dollars FB generates without having to do anything except exist. It doesn’t create one single post you read. Everything you go on there to see is created by someone else who is just using their venue…so if you have a fan base and your own venue, then you are helping them for no reason, and getting nothing in return. I am not the only person to figure this out. FB, you may have noticed, is not only losing younger users…it is losing the content providers. Musicians, writers, artists, are posting less and less. Leaving the newsfeeds nothing more than the sea of bickering, and pictures of lunch ,that it was before us creative types started trying to get something out of it. More and more of us are realizing this and we are leaving because FB does us no good.

“Fan pages” are completely useless, “hosting an event” leads to being unfriended as often as it actually alerts anyone to anything, and posting the same link too many times triggers the algorithm to put you on the lowest priority on people’s newsfeed. Best case scenario when you post something is 6% of your “friends” actually see it at all. Speaking of “invites”, the straw that broke the camels back was just a few days ago when I was inviting readers to an “event” and got this…

FBBLOCKED

 

“Going to fast”…? What the hell does that mean? There isn’t a person breathing air, who has seen me attempt to do anything on a computer that would call it “fast”..or even “average speed”. And would they have us believe some timer starts running when I first click “create event”? …and there is some acceptable amount of time I must spend in between inviting people to prove I am doing so thoughtfully? That they had some college do a double blind test on 100 random people creating events? It’s all bullsh*t, the truth of it is I used the same outside link too many times on “events” and Fb don’t like that. FB don’t want anyone clicking off of FB, and they sure as hell don’t want people to get into the routine of clicking off onto the same outside page over and over because then people might start just going to that page to start with.

understand that FB makes its money showing advertisers that is has a massive captive audience. It has all the stats and figures as to who, how many, how often, and most importantly …how long you are on FB. So, while they don’t say it publicly …they frown on you reposting the same link because this harms the stats they use to make $$$$. Don’t believe me? Make note of how many likes and responses you normally get on something. Then repost the exact same link a few times in one day…the algorythm will drop your right off of your friends newsfeeds for several days leaving your posts essentially invisible. The zeros and ones are at complete odds with being able to promote yourself or your work on FB. The whole process has made Fb a very dull place indeed, and I suspect they learned very little from the disappearance of Myspace about keeping content providers and users happy

This would all be tragic…if it mattered. But according to the traffic on my website…it doesn’t.

So here’s how it’s going to go, sneak previews, photos of what I am working on,rants, blogs, daily musings will start on my webpage, then be emailed to people on the email list, then on intsagram…and eventually on FB when the mood strikes me, or I feel like seeing grown people call each other names over politics. I won’t be interacting much on FB. More and more I’m just interacting with joyless dickheads anyway…and forget discussing any current event rationally there, it can’t be done. You don’t need me to tell you that. People turn off their brains when they log on to FB. Here’s a perfect example…after the attack in CA I posted this modified Meme.

asvterrmem

Clever right? Too clever, everyone started arguing about terrorism and refugees and only about three people bothered to read the bottom and get the joke. I posted it again and in ALL CAPS put -read the bottom idiots-…same result…they argued about terrorism and missed the gag. If I’d have posted the same thing on my own site I would have had thirty people wanting it made into a t-shirt or a bumper sticker, or at the very least gotten a bunch of emails about how funny it was. For anyone trying to express a thought that is even slightly off from Right wing vs Left wing, posting on FB is like trying to clap with one hand. I don’t need it , it don’t need me.

Here’s my advice to you if you have missed my usual lowlife whimsy…bookmark my website, go there often. Sign up for the email list. subscribe to me on Itunes or bookmark the Podcast page. And of course..spend some money. You’re going to spend it anyway. You can spend it on the usual lame crap that you’ve seen a hundred times or you can feed this monster, and allow it to grow and frighten the less sturdy, the more close minded, and the politically correct among us, and entertain you with comics, cartoons and tales of woe. Those pages will have new content several times a week if not daily. Actual content, not clickbait. See you there.

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