So, last night my Facebook feed became crowded with notices from my “friends” that they were all moving to Ello. In actuality, I probably don’t have that many real-world friends, but I suppose I have a decent number of virtual ones — at least according to my Facebook profile. The ones that are migrating offered to invite me to the currently invite-only site, so I figured “what the hey, why not?” And I went ahead and joined the crowd barreling off the FB cliff.
According to its own “WTF” page, Ello is a “simple, beautiful, and ad-free social network created by a small group of artists and designers.” Originally developed as a private space, Ello apparently got so many requests to join that its creators decided to take the network public. The main hook is that Ello promises to be ad-free and not to mine personal data for profit. They hope to make money by creating a great space with cool features that people enjoy using so much they will donate money to support the effort. Sound familiar? Didn’t our last radio pledge drive end just a couple weeks ago? KQED provides a service that people like so much, they just GIVE us money so that we will keep doing it! Imagine…
So, I followed my impulse to join partially because I liked the language, knowing full well the Trojan Horse nature of the rhetoric surrounding most social media. The “sharing” economy is a really nice phrase, for example. And “social network” sounded really positive until David Fincher used it as the title for his creepy portrait of a twee young megalomaniacal zillionaire.
And also, frankly, Facebook has begun to piss me off. First, I spend the little extra time I have checking up on what people are doing and — though I never tire of seeing cats do crazy things (really, who does?) — I have gotten kinda sick of seeing other people’s dinner while eating my bowl of white rice with cold broccoli, listening to humble brags and basically comparing my sorry life to the apparently fab ones others are living.
Second, my feed is getting clogged with ads for things I would never even think of liking — a sign that the algorithm doesn’t work so well for cranky contrarians like yours truly.