In order to keep my daughter busy during the lock down, we encourage her to join a lot of online classes tailored for her grade. Usually, everyone has their own platform/app to broadcast the lessons. Last week, her teacher forwarded a link for a course on Vedic Mathematics which is supposed to help her in doing the math calculations faster. The only catch was that it was conducted through their Facebook page.
Now that was a turnoff. It’s been more than two years since I logged in to Facebook. I was frustrated with the amount of negativity that was being spewed on my wall. Why do I still have an account then, you ask? Just in case if I have to apply for a job in the company which I think is wishful thinking. So I was asking my wife to use her Facebook account for this class. She denied straightaway. She has not been using her account for about 5 years or so now. And she doesn’t even remember her credentials. I had to be the sacrificial goat now.
I logged in two days before the class to check if I can even log in and if the account is active. It was. I checked the notification and messages. Nothing great. Only one person who lost my contact number has pinged me recently asking for my number. Otherwise, it seemed like nobody cared for my existence, which is good. Then, I committed the sin of going through the timeline. I thought I will see posts about Covid 19. First ten posts went like this:
- Aggressive post against the ruling party with intense fanatic debate in the comment section
- Sponsored content elevated by Facebook
- WhatsApp forwards that found their way into Facebook
- Some page that one of my friends liked
- Aggressive post against one or more religions with intense fanatic debate in the comment section
- Pages or content suggested by Facebook
- A friend showing off her cooking skill, kids achievements. Finally, that’s more like what it should be.
- Some contacts trying to sell their quilling, art, classes, etc.
- Some contacts re-sharing a memory suggested by Facebook
- Aggressive against the ruling party with intense fanatic debate in the comment section
That was enough to test the waters. I didn’t dare to enter deep into the abyss. It hasn’t changed a bit in two years.
On the day of the class, I logged in again. This time notification section was showing five of my friends suggesting me to like five different pages that they have created or are following. All in the span of last 24 hours. I think when I logged in, Facebook went and told all my contacts, ‘hey, your friend has returned. Do you want to shower him some love by suggesting some pages to like?’ I don’t know if Facebook has bugs but Facebook definitely bugs. Blame it on the algorithm, shall we?
Some of this thought is shared in this video by the stand-up comedian Aravind SA. Enjoy.
PC: Feature Photo by Kon Karampelas on Unsplash
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Pointless & Prosaic 
There is always a catch….
I came off my personal FB account around 10 years ago, I can still remember this moment very well. I had deleted my account, because back then it was little easier to do this. Then a few days later I get a call from cousin from Haryana. She has never called me so I was worried, as overseas calls back then were mostly bad news. I picked up my phone and straight away her words were, “are you OK, we were worried as you hadn’t commented on FB for a few days” (face slap moment).
I am active on FB for our comedy work and also recently joined internet channel. Thankfully because our comedy page is more commercial, I “don’t” have to wish anyone happy birthday!!!
Take care.
Lolololololol…. Did she want to increase her comments or was she actually concerned? 🤣🤣🤣
I never asked her…..I wished her well and cut the call…
Aah yes, I also suspect that facebook gets to know that you’re back. When I login after months, I get less notifs, when I login after days I get more notifs. My logins are just for work purpose so I don’t even bother checking the motifs. Forget about scrolling through the feed 😂😂😂
How about un following those stupid pages n removing those unnecessary ppl in your profile? 🤔🤔🤔 I did some cleaning on my instagram profile some months ago. It Looks much better now 🙂
She might have got offended 🤣🤣
She came to the UK for my sisters weddings a few years back…she seemed to have got over it 😆😆
Hahahahahaha….. Lucky you. I thought you would have got faansi ki saza 😛😛
Or garam chitter at the very least
Haha yeah
Haha. Most of the elder members of my family are not on fb. Those who are, are busy spreading religious thoughts and promoting other forwards.
FB is more suited for commercial purposes. I hear FB marketing still provides you with good leads. Unfortunately, most of us have lived through the times that Facebook switched from being a site for personal connections to a commercial platform. The same kind of feeling that I got when Orkut was acquited by google and the next few releases were focussing on redesigning the interface that was already working well. 🙂
lol
I did that. I trimmed the friend circle quite a bit. I even posted about it in my blog somewhere. And it is not like one person is always crazy. Different people get crazy at different times including us. Deleting/not using the account is much better than removing people. I anyway don’t like too may pages.
I liked hundreds of pages when I was in school. After a few years, I realised life is much happier without fb. Actually all social media. Glad that blogging is different.
This blog has opened up my understanding of different social platforms, and its positives and negatives. As a high school student, this is something I would note down when using social media for my studies. Well written!
Thank you for dropping by. I am glad you found this useful. Good luck for your studies!