Tag: facebook

Bonus Programs, Algorithms, and You

[This post was substantially rewritten on July 27, 2024]

A few folks have commented and messaged with questions about how FB’s engagement bonus program works. Here’s what little is known to me. None of this is any kind of special inside information, just observations that I’ve been able to at least somewhat validate.

Comment Quality

Comments with fewer than six words or so seem to be of less value.

Copy-paste and template comments are a complete waste of time, and certain phrases have become obviously abused in an attempt by sleazy shortcutters and game-riggers to screw the system. We’ve all seen those posts full of “COUNT ME IN” and “LET’S GO” comments. Not only a huge waste of time, but a huge message to FB that you’re gonna try to cheat the bonus program.

There are easy moderation tools page owners can use to block these messages from ever showing up in the first place. Use them.

I’ve seen pages that aren’t working to prevent/remove/discourage that kind of behavior get dropped from the program. Pages and accounts leaving those comments tend to get algo-suppressed and eventually banned as well, but the people doing it are a) stupid and b) have nine thousand other sockpuppets and bots running anyway so they don’t care.

Content

Quality, original content is the order of the day.

Regular repost content like the Wednesday “post your gig” autopost I’ve had running the last few weeks doesn’t get bonuses (but that’s fine, it’s a useful thing to do for working creative performers and builds the community) and tends to get suppressed by the algo as clickbait.

Not sure how other repost content like the articles I have rotating in the autoposter on a cycle anywhere from around 30 to 90 days is handled. As far as I can tell, substantive content that is reposted on a longer cycle, say 45 days or more, probably does better than stuff that’s reposted weekly or biweekly.

Clickbaiting tactics in general aren’t going to get far. “❤ for a, 🙂 for b” posts, for example, are seen as low-quality content fishing for traffic – I don’t recall the details of the source anymore, but that specific example appears in FB documentation as something that will be penalized by the system. It’s cheap, dumb traffic that’s mostly bots anyway and FB doesn’t want that so they don’t pay for it. (Note: they do want it just badly enough to allow a lot of the ‘bot and other fake activity to happen. It inflates their numbers and allows them to charge more for advertising.)

Their favorite content is about what you’d expect – original memes and status messages short enough to use a graphic background. They choke the hell out of anything that links offsite, but they do pay on it if it’s otherwise quality content e.g. a link to my latest Medium or JHUS article.

Click the image to get this meme in shareable size!

Reels and stories aren’t part of the current bonus program for me, although there are other ways to get paid for them that you may have access to. That’s not to say don’t bother using those tools. It’s still extremely beneficial to propagation and audience growth. It just doesn’t pay through the bonus program.

The very best thing you can do is share with your own additional comment. Sharing content without any commentary, or with a brief and non-descriptive comment like “me too,” is less effective than sharing with a substantial comment. A substantial comment is over six words and adds some kind of meaning or substance. Simply sharing a post without a comment may only generate a minimal amount of interest. Adding a simple emoji or a word like “TRUTH!” doesn’t significantly increase its impact. However, sharing the post with a meaningful comment like “this is really good information, you should check it out,” or “this resonates with me and is worth reading,” or even a detailed personal experience that relates to the content can greatly enhance its value and the algorithm’s response.

“Follow for follow” and “like for like” are bad and you shouldn’t. As convoluted as it may sound, FB really does believe they’re pushing for legitimate, “organic” engagement. L4L/F4F falls under what FB refers to as “coordinated inauthentic activity,” and enough of it won’t just get you demonetized, it’ll get you deleted eventually. There’s nothing wrong with creating communities of creators, but just liking every rando who likes you is probably going to do you more harm than good in the end. Social media sites that use algorithms, like Facebook, interpret that behavior as genuine interest and associates you with those interests and behaviors, and inevitably if you just like and follow everyone who likes and follows you, you’re going to be associated with clickbaiters, spammers, and worse in the algorithm.

Fundraising and mutual aid posts appear to be heavily penalized by the algorithm. It’s getting worse as more and more desperate people are forced to try to survive on crowdfunding, in the exact same way local police will start cracking down on vagrancy-related crimes as you start seeing more people on street corners with their hands out.

The only way to overcome that is to share it like you just discovered a new book of the Bible hand-lettered and signed by Jesus.

It deserves to be said out loud that this is not entirely FB’s fault; over the last couple of years every talentless half-wit with no marketable skills and their mom has decided they’re an “influencer” or “activist” and goes out trolling for cash (sidebar: this has substantially reduced income for those of us who are out here doing meaningful and substantive work and trying to survive, and driven some good people out of the space entirely), and FB actively works to identify and avoid rewarding/encouraging those bad actors. Note that I don’t claim they do this well, but it’s what they’re trying to do.

Obviously, stuff that would be problematic anyway like hate speech, disinformation, etc. is not rewarded by the bonus program and if you do much of it they’ll demonetize you and delete your accounts.

The Bigger Picture

Over the years a trillion get-rich-quick schemers and grifters have turned social media into a largely automated and mostly useless pile of garbage begging for cheap, easy attention. These are the sops you see slapping their t-shirt “designs” (a pithy cheap appeal to ego with variable fonts) on a picture of Keanu Reeves or Morgan Freeman or some other super-popular celebrity with a high level of public trust.

The schemers and get-rich-quick types have built up this industrial strength imitation of human engagement, and FB can’t sell advertising based on the number of ‘bots and sockpuppets that will see it.

They want “real human beings acting like real human beings.” Unfortunately, this puts us real human beings in a position of basically being forced to become unpaid (or paid, even, given this bonus program) Facebook employees whose job it is to keep the platform supplied with a steady stream of quality original content followed by a good solid engagement cycle of real human beings earnestly recommending, reacting to, and sharing that content.

They know they can’t sell ads to ‘bots and AI, so they’re stuck in this weird space: On one hand, they want those numbers. On the other hand, the more garbage traffic there is the fewer human users will engage with the platform at all. (The conversation is much deeper and runs far outside the scope of this article, but this is a core part of it.)

It’s also well worth keeping in mind that these same dynamics apply to other contexts as well. There’s not a special interest or identity group or hobby or celebrity or political label or opinion on a popular topic that doesn’t have seven million auto-pilot Facebook pages devoted to them, every one of them kicking out just the most vapid and ridiculous crap imaginable as they chase that easy money.

I caught one just now as I was taking a quick break and scrolling through FB on my phone, some person with the world’s most obnoxious British accent pretending to ask seriously if it’s true that all Americans have a personal shopping assistant who will help you brings your bags to your car. Of course it’s not true and they don’t believe it and probably made it up or it’s some family in-joke about some mistaken conclusion they drew when they were a little kid or something. But that’s not the point: the point is that’s garbage content intended to generate contentious, rude, ego-driven traffic that creates long arguments in the comment section, each one of which adds to the apparent popularity of the page.

It also exacerbates and amplifies our worst selves. This is where things get serious, because it’s the exact same tendencies that these types of pages play to and exploit, that are leveraged to spread sometimes catastrophically destructive disinformation on a broad scale. We saw this during Covid; we see it every day related to politics and much of the mainstream television news is now playing to those same tendencies in carefully calculated ways. So while the efforts of social media companies to control content quality is very much rooted in profit-seeking and capitalism, those efforts are also important to helping stem the tide of disinformation and misinformation. This is why if you share a lot of “fake news,” eventually it’s going to cost you.

November 9, 2023
How Facebook Is Destroying Democracy (2010)

This was a fairly exceptional find; I’d honestly forgotten about this article, written in March of 2010. Of course when it was written I was jeered and rejected as a handwaving extremist – how could you possibly think Facebook is destroying democracy, that’s just ridiculous – by all right-thinking people, with a healthy chorus of helpful disdain and ridicule from the usual gang of trolls.

President Obama has proposed a 1.4% pay increase for active duty military in 2011. This is THE LOWEST SINCE 1973! Nice to know that during a time of rampant inflation, while war is fought in 2 theatres, our men and women in uniform get A LOWER PAY INCREASE THAN WELFARE RECIPIENTS!!! Please repost if you support our troops….1 Term say good bye

This is the second time in a couple of days I’ve seen this, yet I’m not having a lot of luck finding any objective source that discusses these events, just a FB meme claiming it happened. [2023: This was originally written on March 8, 2010. The claim has since been broadly debunked as the nonsense that it is; military pay is tied to the Employment Cost Index and the president is required by law to propose pay increases tied to this index to ensure military pay rises in line with consumer product price inflation. Much of the related information which follows was written without that knowledge in hand at the time. -jh]

I’d like to see more facts, including a broad discussion of the considerations which go in to making such a decision. For example, what if the rate of increase among military personnel has been 10x the cost of living, while welfare payment caps have dropped, for all of the last ten years except this year in which an adjustment is being made to compensate for decreased military need and increased public assistance need? [2023 – this is where I basically cited the true mechanics of military pay raises without realizing it, in spite of using an extreme example. The underlying reasoning is why military pay is tied directly to ECI. -jh] Obviously this very extreme example is not the case, but the underlying point remains: this is a complex series of issues, and the idea that posting some hyper-patriotic status message with a guilt-trip/us v. them tagline is going to solve anything is not only ridiculous, it’s incredibly destructive – and that’s the point of this article.

It’s not that I reject out of hand the assertion of this latest rabble-rousing meme [2023 – and again rightly so, as the raw numbers were correct, so rejecting the assertion out of hand would’ve been wrong. -jh]. Rather the problem is that I have serious concerns about the direction we are being taken by our collective will to participate in such things without first determining their objective accuracy.

It seems to me that this kind of thing, while usually well-intentioned, represents the same sort of shallowness of thinking that led to the Iraq war in the first place, to some 60% of the US still believing as late as 2006 that Iraq was directly involved with 9-11, to the gigantic stimulus package [2023: this was the enormous bailout of Wall Street banks in 2008. -jh] that regardless of necessity was passed with such haste and sloppiness that it’s an iron-clad certainty that it’s not going to work as well as it could have. We get all revved up over something and we just pounce, with little regard for the long-term results or the bigger picture.

Look around this country, this world, your own mind.

Are you one of the people who thinks it’s perfectly reasonable to continue beating the “Obama’s citizenship’” horse?

Are you someone for whom “because the Bible says so” is a reasonable basis for laws to be made?

Are you someone who doesn’t throw up in their mouths a little bit every time you see a well-intentioned friend post a status message that suggests that if you don’t do the same, you are a traitor to your country and you want soldiers to die?

Then I am sorry, but even if I love you from the very bottom of my heart, you are a Part Of The Problem.

How DARE any human being undertake to pass judgment on my love of country or fellow man – to suggest that I lack ‘patriotism’ or commitment to country or respect for those who volunteer their lives to defend it regardless of whether I think they’re ultimately being conned in 90% of the cases when this is their motivation for enlisting – based on my willingness to endorse with my name and supportive repetition a poorly-constructed paragraph full of – at BEST – emotively presented para-facts intended to do nothing more than stoke the ire of conservatives and further create a society of code words and passphrases by which we can identify “them” and “us” as defined by some arbitrary and subjective standard of political adherence that ultimately exists only in the mind of the person passing judgment? How terribly disrespectful and presumptuous.

Frankly, I wouldn’t post that paragraph in my status message even if I believed every word.

Why not?

For starters, it’s written with all the intellect and critical thought of a rambunctious sixth-grader. I’m 40 years old, and I’d be embarrassed to lay claim to the “logic” and “patriotism” presented here. Look at it. The SCREAMING CAPITALIZATION AND ABUSE OF PUNCTUATION! The saccharine exhortation to “patriotism” that’s really an exhortation to look down our noses at those un-American liberal commie heathens who Don’t Support Our Troops (and in the process of that coercion, an exhortation to frankly piss all over everything that actually makes this country worth fighting for). The snide, unspoken undertone that of anyone in Our Great Nation who might need some money from the government, them welfare leeches (read: ethnic minorities, brown people, and white women who have sex with them; these folks never care that the vast majority of welfare recipients in this country are white people in heavily Republican/right leaning states) better be the LAST in line. The suggestion that “supporting the troops” must necessarily entail supporting their orders. The relentlessly stupid and continually increasing attempt to lay the results of 8 years (and more) of utter mismanagement and malfeasance at the feet of a president who has been in office less than a year and a half.

The whole thing just plain sucks. It’s an intellectual void. I’m sorry that some people will take that personally, but let’s be real here: as much as I complain about people, I wouldn’t waste my time trying to point these things out if I didn’t love and respect them. I’m sorry that it hurts some people’s feelings or moves some people to drop me from their friends’ list or what have you, but remaining silent is not an option. I’d certainly rather your feelings be hurt by me rattling you out of your comfort zone with the truth than they be hurt twenty years from now when you realize it’s too late to stop the decline and part of the reason for that is you were allowed to continue believing things that aren’t true.

There are a lot of times when I’m writing that I feel like the guy at a party just sober enough to try and tell a friend that they’ve pissed themselves, only to get punched in the mouth for saying bad things.

America…you’re drunk on fear and you’ve voided hate and xenophobia all over yourself. Go sober up and change your pants. [2023 – spoiler alert: we not only didn’t sober up, we didn’t even bother changing our pants. We just drank more and more and insisted that anyone who didn’t void themselves in their Levi’s was an unamerican traitor in thrall to the illegitimate Kenyan non-citizen President. And it worked on about 70 million of us, and it’s still working. -jh]

All I’m saying is that if you want to have something to say, try to make it something meaningful and fact-based if you’re going to complain about the government. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to gripe without relying on this kind of unsupported hyperbolic hang-wringing panic-button nonsense, and in many cases (like this one) the unspoken messages tend to ring much louder with the coherent observer than the spoken ones do. When I see a message like this, all I read is “I’m really worried about the economy and my position in life, but I can’t be bothered to find an effective way to improve things for myself so I’ll just whine about the evil gubmint.” In the mean time, people are continually manipulated into cheering for the defeat of a health care bill that would, without question, save their lives or the life of someone they love in reasonably short order. [2023 – this was, of course, what became “Obamacare” after it was watered down and compromised to the point of being only slightly less odious than the godforsaken trainwreck of a health care system we had in place already. Obama’s compromise on this remains one of my greatest disappointments in his presidency. -jh]

But instead the politicians play on our fears and prejudices, and we continue buying in. It’s not health care reform people are rallying against, it’s the notion that they might have to pay for someone else’s care…which, if people were really angry about it, would be the absolute end of the insurance industry (and would also result in a 20-year drop in our life expectancy in a matter of a generation or two) given that’s the entire basis of the idea of insurance.

The problem in this country, quite frankly, is that we’ve become a nation of selfish, greedy, avaricious, entitled, lazy, ignorant, jerks. [2023 – and it’s only gotten worse since I wrote this in 2010. -jh] Until we get it through our heads that we are ALL in this together and when one person fails we all fail, we’re going to continue these silly, pointless arguments, and people will continue to die senselessly and our nation will continue to erode as our best and brightest are continually prevented from reaching their full potential by the efforts of those who hold the cash to avoid sharing it with anyone.

These snarky, factually void, and often logically broken memes are a huge part of the problem. They play on mob mentality and the human need for acceptance in order to manipulate people into rallying against the very things that would improve their lives. We get the leadership we get because we consistently refuse to educate ourselves to understand what real leadership and real solutions look like. These kinds of memes make this refusal not just okay, but popular and easy – why bother knowing what’s going on in the world when we can just get it from our friends’ status updates?

It is the fundamental obligation of a free citizen to make every possible effort to understand the issues and candidates that are spread before us at election time. It is a direct assault on that obligation, and on freedom itself, to reduce this obligation to a copy-and-paste lynch mob.

93% of people won’t have the guts to tell their friends to quit trying to manipulate them (and to quit allowing themselves to be manipulated!) via status messages….will YOU?

[2023 – you can see in this article some of the roots that led me to start attending university to major in communication and minor in political science about five months after this was written. While it’s not bad, I generally failed to make the points I was reaching for, in large part because my abilities were limited by my lack of formal education in the subjects under the review and criticism of qualified professionals in the field. Still, I prefer being honest to stroking myself with ego-gratifying lies, and the honest thing to do is let it sit as written and accept that while I did a competent job of explaining my position, it’s a far cry from the level of expertise I could’ve brought to the conversation even a year later, let alone now nearly a decade and a half in the future. Among other major issues, I failed to clearly make the point that absorbing our political information in memes and snippets crafted primarily to appeal to our egos is poisonous to our democracy and we not only need to stop doing it, we need to pressure social media companies to enact stronger protections against the propagation of disinformation. It’s a good article, but it didn’t make the case I wanted it to as strongly as I’d hoped, in retrospect. -jh]

October 6, 2023
Six Easy Ways To Avoid Facebook Jail
Ah, Facebook jail. I’ve spent many an hour carving hashtags in those brick walls while waiting for some minor offense to fade. I’ve come close to losing my account completely a couple of times over the years.

It’s easy to joke about, but for people like me whose livelihood depends on social media and who aren’t just scam artists that don’t care if they burn through 200 identities a year, the prospect of losing an account or having a page shut down after you’ve spent years building it up can be a major threat. Late last year, a fairly huge page where I was co-administrator was shuttered by FB for some repeated violations (by other admins). I’ve not talked about what I know about that situation, but today I’m going to share what I learned from that, and from my other brushes with the long arm of the Zuck.

There’s some stuff I’m not going to cover here – if you’re posting crappy spam fake t-shirt ads or lonely-hearts scams and things like that, you know what you’re doing and I’m not trying to help you anyway. Also, this is just about Facebook. Different platforms have different standards and rules. Like I used to tell my daughter, the four most important letters in the English language are “RTFM,” so make sure you RTFM if you’re not sure about something.

Let’s get started! Use the header button below to navigate between pages, it’s a fairly long post and I didn’t want to wall-o-text you.

Disinformation, Misinformation, and “Fake News”

Disinfo on Facebook has always been a problem and in some ways always will be. The reality of the world is that there is no possible way Facebook can hire enough human beings to read every flagged or reported message and spend even five minutes carefully assessing it. However, there are some pretty common things that scammers and traffic maggots love doing that are a fast and easy way to get thrown off the network.

Super important: If you are running a page or group and something posted there gets a fact check overlay put on it, DELETE THE POST IMMEDIATELY, DO NOT LET IT JUST SIT THERE WITH THE FACT CHECK ON IT.

This is what caused the big Obama page to get taken down; we had an admin who would occasionally post questionably sourced information and particularly memes, and they’d get fact-checked. What we didn’t realize is that every time that happened and the rest of the admins let it stay up (because we were all trying to not step on each other’s stuff and like most people we figured better to leave it out there so people could see the fact check), it was another red flag in the algorithm…and they accumulate. They don’t go away. So after a decade of that, we got shut down, and while the source of the problem was definitely a single admin, from FB’s point of view it was the problem of all the admins because nobody removed the stuff. A decade-plus of work and 200,000+ readers gone overnight, and no way to get ’em back ever.
- Fake celebrity death reports – this is way too common, still. Not a day goes by when I don’t see some jerk posting about Simon Cowell or whoever’s likely to draw traffic dying tragically in the hospital. Aside from my feelings on the matter there are tons of people who just can’t resist sharing this kind of stuff because they see it and go OH MY GOODNESS SIMON COWELL WAS KILLED BY A MOSQUITO BITE ON HIS TAINT! I HAVE TO TELL ALL MY FRIENDS WHO LOVE X-FACTOR! Don’t. Don’t, don’t, don’t, DON’T do this. ANY time you see a celebrity death report, even if it looks like it’s coming from a legitimate source, check the news first. Until you see it on trusted outlets – regardless of your political biases – don’t believe it and don’t share it. (Bonus points: check your local network television station website! They’ll usually have stories like this covered within a few minutes of the story being officially and reliably confirmed.)
- False medical/health information – regrettably Facebook has become less aggressive about nuking stuff like telling people to drink horse dewormer to treat viral infections, but the most egregious stuff will still be flagged. It’s not just about stuff like Covid though, and it’s not just about “what’s in the news right now.” NaturalNews.Com and the odious con man who owns them, Dr. Joseph Mercola, finally got thrown off the platform for constantly pushing bad health information so he could sell useless supplements to the naive and credulous, and FB’s tolerance for this sort of scam has become very, very low. Just like above, that means a whole lot of folks are risking the loss of their accounts for sharing this kind of information because they don’t know any better. Those unfortunates are created by people like Mercola, but that’s not going to save them from getting banned or ultimately booted off the network if they share this kind of (completely wrong and dangerous and utterly scamtastic) content.
- Fake missing animal or missing people reports – this is a more insidious form of disinformation that’s currently rising in popularity. The way this works is the scammer will post a message to a ton of regional pages and groups about a missing animal, which induces just about everybody to go “awwwww” and share the post. Then when the scammer sees one going viral, they change the post to something different and very much not what you thought you were sharing. This can range from scam sales and malware links to odious political stuff like white supremacist or neo-Nazi content. Be sure you check out any information like this very carefully before sharing it; if it’s not sourced from a law enforcement agency or known journalism source, it’s probably fake and you shouldn’t touch it.
As a general rule, if you can’t find the information on a major news site or in a peer-reviewed journal article, don’t trust it until you can. Important caveat: sites like PubMed are often mistaken for reliable sources, but they’re just source aggregators and not all the journals they aggregate from are reliable. If you’re not sure, don’t share!

Bullying & Violence

Look, there’s no polite reason to say this and no reason to say it politely – if trying to intimidate people with threats is your jam, you don’t belong online at all. You’re not fit to operate in public until you grow up. Nobody’s impressed with your empty claims about how much you can bench or how many guns you own or how you’re gonna kick someone’s ass if they don’t stop posting entirely legit news stories about Donald Trump being a criminal scam artist. Frankly, I don’t expect anyone who would do this to even find this article, but if you do…stop that crap.

For people whose entire personality isn’t a giant obvious attempt to hide their cowardice and low self-esteem behind a bunch of aggression, though, there are still risks. For instance, I got a pre-emptive warning the other day for a comment I was about to make that had some wordplay on “punch” – I don’t remember exactly what it was, but it was something on the level of “people like this make me feel punchtastic.” In that case I was offered the chance to delete the comment before they sanctioned the account, which is the first time I’ve ever seen that, and there’s no indication it left a lasting sanction on my account because I did in fact delete the comment immediately.

A few years back, though, I had a guy not far from me tell me straight up he was going to shoot me, skin me, and eat me. I reported the comment. He wasn’t sanctioned…but when I posted a screenshot of his threat, I got banned! So just avoid that kind of language if possible, especially if it’s in any way suggestive of a threat or of inciting other people. Stuff like “burn it all down” is likely to get you banned. (There are weak spots; I ran across a neo-Nazi a few weeks ago whose bio said straight up “shoot all communists” and that seems to have escaped FB’s notice until it was reported.)

While it’s a much milder form of this kind of talk, you also want to avoid telling people to “f–k off” and things like that. You’ll get banned. Trust me. Even aggressive but not “dirty” language like “shut up and sit down” will draw a ban if you aren’t extremely artful about it.

And stop “hey-babying” in the comments. “You’re so beautiful, please send me a friend request” isn’t fooling anyone – you’re a horndog with boundary issues and that’s just not cool, in public or in private.

Sexually explicit material

There are two very broad categories here. Let’s knock out the easy one first, and this goes out to the men: nobody wants to see your penis unless they ask you to see it, and if they do don’t show it to them on Facebook even in a private message. I can’t believe I have to say that out loud, but my female friends assure me that this is still a near-daily problem. STOP IT. If someone wants to see your junk they’ll ask you to see it. If they do, don’t show it to them on Facebook.

The second category is a bit tougher, and that’s the stuff that can reasonably be described as “artistic depictions.” FB is more relaxed than some about this – if you throw a giant emoji over your crotch in a photo, you’re usually safe so long as the subject is clearly an adult. There’s been a ton of controversy over artistic depictions, and that’s softened up a bit; I’ve seen painting or statues with full frontal nudity that weren’t taken down, and pictures involving life-like prosthetic penises as well, but then others get yanked. Best to avoid. They’ve also softened up on photos of breastfeeding, which was a big controversy a few years back; these days the rule of thumb seems to be that if you can’t see a nipple or any part of the areola, you’re okay.

Note well: depictions of sex acts, no matter how “artistically” rendered, still seem to be completely off-limits even if you cover the naughty bits. Ditto any references to minors, “family relations,” or sexual violence in any context but straight reporting of news or clinical discussion of issues is likely to get you banned (although to my eternal confusion, running around calling everyone a “groomer” or “pedophile” seems to be just fine with Zuck &Co).

Privacy Violations & Over-Networking

Ever notice how people will post a screen cap of a facebook comment and edit out the name and user icon of the commenter? That’s because Facebook considers posting those, especially when you’re criticizing or making fun of the comment, as intimidation; they treat it like you’re trying to get your readers to go mob-harass the poster. To be on the safe side, if you’re going to do the thing where you screencap your trolls and post their more entertaining BS, black out their identity. Oddly this doesn’t seem to apply to original posts, only to comments and inbox messages.

Doxxing people is bannable, even if they have their information fully visible on their page. Don’t. It’s an intimidation tactic and will be sanctioned.

“Over-networking” is when you add too many friends, follow too many pages, or send too many invites or friend requests in a short period of time. This behavior is almost always driven by commercial interest – trying to grow an audience by high-volume contact-making rather than by creating quality content and

Stupid Spam Tricks & “Dirty Words”

I’ve made occasional remarks for years about the tactic of “munging” words that are problematic – “adult” language, or words like “Covid” or “vaccine.” Those people who do things like t.hi.s and or talk about “yt ppl” instead of “white people” think they’re being clever? They’re not. They’re buffoons who think they’re smart, and here’s the funny part – Facebooks algorithm won’t punish you for saying “Covid,” but if you say c.o.vi.d they absolutely will because that’s a clear sign you’re deliberately trying to avoid/trick the algo, and that’s a clear display of intent to post content you think is a violation and get away with it. That makes you a troublemaker who’s intentionally trying to get away with breaking the rules, and that gets the algo’s negative attention even if you’re not actually breaking them.

You’re not gonna get banned for simply naming an identity group in discussion. You say something like “all white people are murderers,” then yeah. That’s not because you said “white people,” it’s because that’s bigoted as hell and bigotry is not allowed. Same with Black people or any other ethnic group, LBGT folks, etc. You’re not getting banned for using a neutral and inoffensive label for a group, you’re getting banned for what you say about that group, because what you said about that group was prejudiced/discriminatory/bigoted/racist/sexist/homophobic. You’re not getting banned for “talking about” vaccines, you’re getting banned because what you’re saying can kill people, ya jerk. Maybe take a look at that instead of thinking you’re c.l.ev.e.r.ly f00ling the algo.

You really won’t get banned for saying the “seven dirty words” in and of themselves (the two of those words that describe actions – “cs” and “mf” – are riskier). If you feel the need to mask those words to avoid jarring your audience, just use the classic asterisk substitution for that f***ing s**t. James Fell’s entire gimmick is “sweary history,” and he doesn’t make anything. It’s not the words themselves, it’s how you use them. If you say “that Rage Against The Machine concert was f***ing awesome” they don’t care. If you say “you’re a f***ing jerk and you need to f**k off,” they will – even if you mask it, because now you’re being aggressive. I drew a thirty-day ban once for posting 8 letters and a symbol to a troll: “STFU & GTFO.” It’s the tone and intent of the words, not the words themselves, unless the words themselves are slurs. Always mask those if you’re discussing them, and never use them as slurs.

Wheaton’s Law

Nearly all of this stuff really does just come down to not being a jerk, and avoiding the risk of looking like you’re being a jerk. Nobody wants to read hate speech and swaggering threats and sexist creepiness and transphobic stupidity. There are behaviors I’ve very intentionally left out of this article that will definitely get you banned, because frankly if you’re the kind of person who does/says those kinds of things you’re a dick, you don’t need to be part of a community until you can get your act together, and I’m not going to help you avoid being treated the way your behavior and attitude clearly justify.

Facebook’s highest priority is creating a space where people feel reasonably safe, free from intimidation and aggression and bigotry, and allowed to be their authentic selves, while giving maximum possible latitude for robust discussion, even of controversial subjects. They’re not perfect by any means, and sometimes they just plain blow it, but if you’re honest with yourselves and do our genuine best to honor Wheaton’s Law, you’re probably not going to find yourself unable to participate in Facebook.

Thanks for reading, I hope you find this information useful! Please remember to share it with all your friends so they don’t get banned!
September 18, 2023
AfterParty 1.5

Hey everyone, welcome to another AfterParty, I’m your suave and debonair host, let’s chat a bit!

In my last AP I talked about having been quite “up” mentally for a sustained period, which was nice, but it had sort of leveled off a bit. The day after that dropped. I had a few things hit me that brought me down pretty hard for a bit – primarily, the absolutely undeniable evidence that my long-held (and long-confirmed, but not concretely) suspicions about where so much of the ongoing pressure against me – which dates long before Facebook or this site, back to the late 90s for the most part – was coming from.

I’d have rather been wrong, frankly, and the ensuing mental conversation really dragged me down for a few days, back in the ol’ depression soup of wondering whether any of this is worth doing in the first place, the usual drill. I was hoping it wouldn’t get that far at all, but as anyone who’s struggled with mental illness will testify you’re not always in as much control as you’d like to believe you are.

The good news is I’m slowly pulling back up – in the end there’s nothing I can do about any of it anyway, all I can do is keep being me and moving forward as best as possible with the tools I’ve got. I figure if I was gonna be out for “revenge,” that’d be about the best version of it anyway. I’ve written elsewhere about this in more detail, and don’t want to get deeply into again, just offering it out as a way of apologizing for being rather unproductive over the last week, including being a day late on this newsletter.

On the up side I got the renamed “Morning Message” out with proper video & podcast today, and hopefully my sleep schedule will start working backwards a bit so the whole “morning” thing doesn’t get too ironic. I suspect it will, but right now I’m still in that “I might just get caught up in something an then suddenly realize it’s 3am” mode so I don’t want to make too many promises, but I think I’m on the road back to at least baseline productivity.

Also dropped a pretty significant Medium article a few days ago. I tripped over a huge botnet/psyop nest on facebook – because they kept shoveling it in front of me so I couldn’t ignore it! – and started trying to ignore it only to find it was EVERYWHERE. Millions of people following hundreds of pages spamming from dozens of websites, etc., all of it either anti-democratic propaganda of some kind or glurgey sappy nostaligia and “aww cute” and ‘WE LUV DA SOJERS’ stuff crafted to catch folks who maybe aren’t caught up on the way the world’s information has shifted in the last ten or twenty years, get ’em following, and then start pushing them a little at a time.

“The good old days!” That pulls a bunch of people. “When women knew their place and other people weren’t so uppity!” that loses a bunch…but you know the ones who are left are well-primed to be receptive to manipulation through bigotry and ignorance and fear, and we’re off to the races and pretty soon we’re reposting leftist satire as right-wing news and people are falling for it like autumn leaves, working themselves up into a torches-and-pitchforks froth of xenophobia and bitterness, and pretty soon it’s that damned gub’mint and we oughta. So that whole story’s at Medium and needs daylight, it’s an obviously coordinated foreign influence op being given a rocket-fuel boost by our buddy Da Zuck.

So.

A few months ago I was living in a hotel room, day to day, all my stuff in bins, no vehicle, no escape, and little hope. Now I’m in a home with a room and a desk and a computer connection and at least a rudimentary work environment. How that happened is another one of those “holy crap, is this my life?” moments that have so famously followed me around over the years.

I’ve told the story in the past of why I was never a Jack Daniels’ drinker, but it’s been a minute. One night when I was fifteen, I went out with some friends and laid hands on a fifth of jack and a three-liter bottle of Mountain Dew, and proceeded to slam it and chase it and slam it and chase it and slam it and chase it 1985 rock star style until I was absolutely beyond drunk. Only a couple of memories of the night at all – one of tooling down the road in front of Upjohn’s world HQ in my buddy’s Pinto wagon, one of continually trying to unbutton another friend’s shirt, but other than that the night is and has always been a blank.

Since then I’ve not been able to stand the taste of any kind of whiskey or bourbon or scotch.

Naturally as tends to happen that group of friends drifted apart, life went on, and so forth, and now I’m living in a hotel just one bare fingernail from falling off the cliff forever. I had at least had the presence of mind to join the chain’s rewards program, so I was building up loyalty points good for rewards like free or discounted room prices.

It’s like a Tuesday afternoon, and I’m out of money with no sign of any coming in soon. I’d already had a miraculous amount of help – I stayed in that hotel for a month! – and the proverbial well appeared to be dry for the moment.

I walk down to the hotel office to start the process of cashing in my points, and as I’m standing there talking to the hotel clerk I thought I barely heard someone say my name.

There’s zero reason for this to happen. Nobody in this place even knows my name except the desk help, and they’ve likely not even noticed it. I glanced around, didn’t see anyone I recognized, and turned back to the clerk, set my arrangements, and started walking out…and I heard my name again.

I turn around…and it’s the girl whose shirt I’d been trying to take off thirty-seven years ago. Hadn’t seen or talked to her since probably early 1987 at the latest.

We get to talking, “what are you doing here” “what are YOU doing here” etc. Long story short: she was working on the side because she’s on disability with a terminal cancer diagnosis, stage four in lungs and brain. Super sad. But also, she lives alone and has a spare room and pretty much needs someone to be around to call 911 in case she collapses unexpectedly or something, and heck yeah it’d be a favor to me if you’d move in. Don’t even worry about rent, don’t worry about getting a job or any of the rest of that crap, do what you can, but I just need someone around like right now and it sounds like you’re a perfect candidate.

Here’s the kicker. You hear “stage four terminal” and think oh, wow, that’s tragedy, aren’t you worried you’re like, taking advantage or something? Thing is, in terms of health she’s ridiculously fine. She had collapsed back in August and at that time the ER docs gave her like…weeks. I ran into her in March and wouldn’t have known any of that to look at her. Still don’t. And she’s one of those types that’s not gonna just sit around waiting to die just because someone said she was gonna.

So now I’m living here, helping out around the house, being a friend, and finally being allowed, in good faith, to have the time and space I need to actually work, rather than the series of bad-faith attempts to exploit and leverage my powerlessness in one situation to gain further power over my in the guise of “helping” (but now you owe me). We’re not in any kind of relationship or any of that stuff, but our past history definitely helps overcome the gap between in terms of “knowing each other,” we’re both still the same people just older, so it’s a sort of neat combination of being friends and strangers.

And that, assembled guests, is the deus ex machina that probably saved me from being on the streets. I had another day and that was it – no money, nowhere to go, no way to get there.

That is why you’re seeing such a sharp spike in my work lately. Took some weeks to get my head adjusted and out of the horrible farce of existence I’d been in for two and a half years in that damn boarding house, but once that started lifting things started flowing and other than the bump last week really have been ever since.

I’m still not by any means affluent, but I have a stable roof over my head (she owns the house), and her day gig (which she went back to out of boredom) is in industrial food service so even though I have almost no money I still eat. This is extra bonus because it allows me to focus on putting support from folks like you toward my work, rather than just toward trying to keep my dumb ass alive for another day! It’s still a struggle to keep up just the bills associated with the low level or work I’m doing now – Adobe, Microsoft Office, the autoposter for the websites, various other little bits and pieces. And of course my roommate’s diet is pretty limited so I’m eating a whole lot of chemo patient safe food, but on the bright side I’ve also lost almost forty pounds since I’ve been here, from the last time I weighed in at the doctor when I was at the old place. I was 253 there, I think, and right now I’m around 215. Supposedly 197 is optimal; we’ll see if I get that far and what it looks like.

So that’s my little story for the week about how life’s going backstage here at JH Central I’m going to go ahead and set this public at the normal Tuesday Noon next week. For now as always my many thanks and unspeakable gratitude for your ongoing support, and keep an eye on the website and other platforms for ongoing new content including the newsletters plus more on the multi-part content I’ve already started and whatever comes up between now and next time!

Oh, hey. Check out this old song that has absolutely no right being as awesome as it is! You can’t imagine how much this was my favorite song when I was like…three.

Love y’all, see you soon.

June 6, 2023
AfterParty 1.5 (Advance)

Hey everyone, welcome to another AfterParty, I’m your suave and debonair host, let’s chat a bit!

In my last AP I talked about having been quite “up” mentally for a sustained period, which was nice, but it had sort of leveled off a bit. The day after that dropped. I had a few things hit me that brought me down pretty hard for a bit – primarily, the absolutely undeniable evidence that my long-held (and long-confirmed, but not concretely) suspicions about where so much of the ongoing pressure against me – which dates long before Facebook or this site, back to the late 90s for the most part – was coming from.

I’d have rather been wrong, frankly, and the ensuing mental conversation really dragged me down for a few days, back in the ol’ depression soup of wondering whether any of this is worth doing in the first place, the usual drill. I was hoping it wouldn’t get that far at all, but as anyone who’s struggled with mental illness will testify you’re not always in as much control as you’d like to believe you are.

The good news is I’m slowly pulling back up – in the end there’s nothing I can do about any of it anyway, all I can do is keep being me and moving forward as best as possible with the tools I’ve got. I figure if I was gonna be out for “revenge,” that’d be about the best version of it anyway. I’ve written elsewhere about this in more detail, and don’t want to get deeply into again, just offering it out as a way of apologizing for being rather unproductive over the last week, including being a day late on this newsletter.

On the up side I got the renamed “Morning Message” out with proper video & podcast today, and hopefully my sleep schedule will start working backwards a bit so the whole “morning” thing doesn’t get too ironic. I suspect it will, but right now I’m still in that “I might just get caught up in something an then suddenly realize it’s 3am” mode so I don’t want to make too many promises, but I think I’m on the road back to at least baseline productivity.

Also dropped a pretty significant Medium article a few days ago. I tripped over a huge botnet/psyop nest on facebook – because they kept shoveling it in front of me so I couldn’t ignore it! – and started trying to ignore it only to find it was EVERYWHERE. Millions of people following hundreds of pages spamming from dozens of websites, etc., all of it either anti-democratic propaganda of some kind or glurgey sappy nostaligia and “aww cute” and ‘WE LUV DA SOJERS’ stuff crafted to catch folks who maybe aren’t caught up on the way the world’s information has shifted in the last ten or twenty years, get ’em following, and then start pushing them a little at a time.

“The good old days!” That pulls a bunch of people. “When women knew their place and other people weren’t so uppity!” that loses a bunch…but you know the ones who are left are well-primed to be receptive to manipulation through bigotry and ignorance and fear, and we’re off to the races and pretty soon we’re reposting leftist satire as right-wing news and people are falling for it like autumn leaves, working themselves up into a torches-and-pitchforks froth of xenophobia and bitterness, and pretty soon it’s that damned gub’mint and we oughta. So that whole story’s at Medium and needs daylight, it’s an obviously coordinated foreign influence op being given a rocket-fuel boost by our buddy Da Zuck.

So.

A few months ago I was living in a hotel room, day to day, all my stuff in bins, no vehicle, no escape, and little hope. Now I’m in a home with a room and a desk and a computer connection and at least a rudimentary work environment. How that happened is another one of those “holy crap, is this my life?” moments that have so famously followed me around over the years.

I’ve told the story in the past of why I was never a Jack Daniels’ drinker, but it’s been a minute. One night when I was fifteen, I went out with some friends and laid hands on a fifth of jack and a three-liter bottle of Mountain Dew, and proceeded to slam it and chase it and slam it and chase it and slam it and chase it 1985 rock star style until I was absolutely beyond drunk. Only a couple of memories of the night at all – one of tooling down the road in front of Upjohn’s world HQ in my buddy’s Pinto wagon, one of continually trying to unbutton another friend’s shirt, but other than that the night is and has always been a blank.

Since then I’ve not been able to stand the taste of any kind of whiskey or bourbon or scotch.

Naturally as tends to happen that group of friends drifted apart, life went on, and so forth, and now I’m living in a hotel just one bare fingernail from falling off the cliff forever. I had at least had the presence of mind to join the chain’s rewards program, so I was building up loyalty points good for rewards like free or discounted room prices.

It’s like a Tuesday afternoon, and I’m out of money with no sign of any coming in soon. I’d already had a miraculous amount of help – I stayed in that hotel for a month! – and the proverbial well appeared to be dry for the moment.

I walk down to the hotel office to start the process of cashing in my points, and as I’m standing there talking to the hotel clerk I thought I barely heard someone say my name.

There’s zero reason for this to happen. Nobody in this place even knows my name except the desk help, and they’ve likely not even noticed it. I glanced around, didn’t see anyone I recognized, and turned back to the clerk, set my arrangements, and started walking out…and I heard my name again.

I turn around…and it’s the girl whose shirt I’d been trying to take off thirty-seven years ago. Hadn’t seen or talked to her since probably early 1987 at the latest.

We get to talking, “what are you doing here” “what are YOU doing here” etc. Long story short: she was working on the side because she’s on disability with a terminal cancer diagnosis, stage four in lungs and brain. Super sad. But also, she lives alone and has a spare room and pretty much needs someone to be around to call 911 in case she collapses unexpectedly or something, and heck yeah it’d be a favor to me if you’d move in. Don’t even worry about rent, don’t worry about getting a job or any of the rest of that crap, do what you can, but I just need someone around like right now and it sounds like you’re a perfect candidate.

Here’s the kicker. You hear “stage four terminal” and think oh, wow, that’s tragedy, aren’t you worried you’re like, taking advantage or something? Thing is, in terms of health she’s ridiculously fine. She had collapsed back in August and at that time the ER docs gave her like…weeks. I ran into her in March and wouldn’t have known any of that to look at her. Still don’t. And she’s one of those types that’s not gonna just sit around waiting to die just because someone said she was gonna.

So now I’m living here, helping out around the house, being a friend, and finally being allowed, in good faith, to have the time and space I need to actually work, rather than the series of bad-faith attempts to exploit and leverage my powerlessness in one situation to gain further power over my in the guise of “helping” (but now you owe me). We’re not in any kind of relationship or any of that stuff, but our past history definitely helps overcome the gap between in terms of “knowing each other,” we’re both still the same people just older, so it’s a sort of neat combination of being friends and strangers.

And that, assembled guests, is the deus ex machina that probably saved me from being on the streets. I had another day and that was it – no money, nowhere to go, no way to get there.

That is why you’re seeing such a sharp spike in my work lately. Took some weeks to get my head adjusted and out of the horrible farce of existence I’d been in for two and a half years in that damn boarding house, but once that started lifting things started flowing and other than the bump last week really have been ever since.

I’m still not by any means affluent, but I have a stable roof over my head (she owns the house), and her day gig (which she went back to out of boredom) is in industrial food service so even though I have almost no money I still eat. This is extra bonus because it allows me to focus on putting support from folks like you toward my work, rather than just toward trying to keep my dumb ass alive for another day! It’s still a struggle to keep up just the bills associated with the low level or work I’m doing now – Adobe, Microsoft Office, the autoposter for the websites, various other little bits and pieces. And of course my roommate’s diet is pretty limited so I’m eating a whole lot of chemo patient safe food, but on the bright side I’ve also lost almost forty pounds since I’ve been here, from the last time I weighed in at the doctor when I was at the old place. I was 253 there, I think, and right now I’m around 215. Supposedly 197 is optimal; we’ll see if I get that far and what it looks like.

So that’s my little story for the week about how life’s going backstage here at JH Central I’m going to go ahead and set this public at the normal Tuesday Noon next week. For now as always my many thanks and unspeakable gratitude for your ongoing support, and keep an eye on the website and other platforms for ongoing new content including the newsletters plus more on the multi-part content I’ve already started and whatever comes up between now and next time!

Oh, hey. Check out this old song that has absolutely no right being as awesome as it is! You can’t imagine how much this was my favorite song when I was like…three.

Love y’all, see you soon.

May 31, 2023
JH Afterparty, Vol 1. Issue 1

It’s Go Time!

Hi everyone and welcome to the first official edition of the JH AfterParty newsletter! This will be my “supporter-Patron perk” content, or at least part of it: Patrons and people who support or have supported my work financially get to read this when it’s released, and everyone else will be able to see it in a week.

Lots of exciting stuff to talk about here, so let’s get right to it!

First, as should be obvious if you’re reading this on my site, I’ve implemented a proper authentication system on JohnHenry.US now, so that supporters who contribute via methods other than Patreon will be able to get their (admittedly nominal, at present anyway) “perks” as supporters.

Right now this comes primarily in the form of posts/newsletters/content just like this one.

The habit I’m striving for with this is “every Tuesday.” So every Tuesday (ostensibly!) I’m going to write a sort of “backstage diary” type of post where things are more casual, less go-go-go and bullet pointed, and more this is what I’ve been thinking about and doing lately.

Also a place for some of my more personal musings and ramblings, for instance I think this would be the right place to tell the whole story of this old friend who deus ex machina’d out of nowhere and gave me exactly the things I was missing to turn everything around – basically the time and space to work that I’ve been promised multiple times in the past and always ended up getting “not so much” and conditions and hurry up and hey when you gonna get a job.

All that sort of personal rambly stuff that has often taken place on my Facebook page will be shifting in to these newsletters, too – I figure most of the folks who would care to read stuff like that are already supporters anyway 🙂

(Sidebar: if you are a past supporter but have never had an account here, get with me via the contact form and we’ll get you set up properly.)

Now that I have the proper infrastructure in place, my weekly casual newsletters that I’ve been referring to as my “patron previews” and will now be known as “JH AfterParty” (see below) will also be posted here under the same “conditions” – they’re only visible to logged in users who have supported my work somehow for the first week after publication, then they’re public-access. Folks who just create accounts so they can access the forums are in a different group and will have the same access as the general public; the posts will be available to them a week after they’re available to supporters, both here and on Patreon.

I do plan to continue duplicating the work at both JHUS and Patreon, though; there are people who are Patrons first and JH fans second, and I want to make sure they’re getting their due. Plus it helps the whole *shudder* marketing situation on that platform, by way of the same folks.

Oh crap, I’m a rock star.

Part of this comes from an unfortunate reality I’m facing: I’m going to have to stop being quite so accessible. The scope and volume of noise arrayed against me is just deranges, with obsessed twits crossing over into people who have jacked me around and got caught and cut off crossing over into plain old psychos crossing over into all those various forces of capitalism and grift that have plagued my online presence for so long now.

It’s sad, but a lot of that over the years has taken the form of bad-faith “friends” and people playing on my various buttons to get close so they could use me or ingratiate themselves – and this is a problem that goes all the way back to my childhood, mind you, because of who and what I am – and it’s come to the point where I just don’t trust any private communication from people I don’t know anymore (or from a lot of people I do).

Consequently I’m sort of shutting off most of the DM capabilities on my social media or heavily restricting it to a closely vetted list of friends when I can. I will instead have a contact form at JohnHenry.US (actually do now); if you’ve got something to say but you’re so worried about it being a problem for you that you’re afraid of leaving footprints behind with your message (like the network information that’s routinely collected by every website you visit), I don’t care to hear from you anyway to be honest.

The hardest part of this is how many people who started out as readers have become friends over the years, and by no means am I shutting those people out en masse or going all Greta Garbo on everyone. I hope to continue developing new friendships and relationships from an expanding readership/fan base over time. But leaving myself wide open just invites too many bad actors to waste too much of my time and energy, and yours, so I’m closing some things off and “funneling” others, which also helps me manage my time more efficiently and effectively in terms of organization.

I anticipate that, over time, the forum at JHUS will grow to supplant the greater part of the “community” aspect of my social media platforms, and from that perspective unfortunately I’m going to start looking a whole lot more like the standard-issue in terms of presentation. Hopefully I’m picking up the things that work without the things that don’t or that I feel fundamentally compromise the work when I start worrying more about advertising and marketing than about creating quality original content.

As I was writing this I decided to name this newsletter the “JH AfterParty.” The afterparty is where friends of the band hang out after the show, and everyone else hears about it a week later, so the whole thing ties nicely thematically. Especially since I plan to run it on Tuesday afternoons and that’s usually about when I’d be waking up from an afterparty from a really solid Saturday night gig back in the day 😉

Keeping up & wrapping up

I don’t want to duplicate work so in terms of raw, “this is what I did here’s the links and what it was all about” stuff please please PLEASE do get subscribed to my weekly Substack digest. (There’s also a signup form in the sidebar of JohnHenry.US). Every Saturday I publish a digest of the prior week’s work that includes links to new content and ongoing discussion of non-content work as well. That’s the very best way for anyone, regardless of whether or how they’re supporting my work, to keep up with what I’m doing. Please don’t forget to share those links around and all that other stuff; more than anything else, engagement is absolute king, and now that it finally seems like I’m firmly headed in the right direction it’s more important than ever.

As I’m writing this message I’m bouncing back and forth between other tasks, including other content work plus putting together tomorrow’s newsletter. Let’s talk quickly about what you should expect to see upcoming, and I’ll get out of your hair.

Ain’t no party like a JH AfterParty cuz a WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?!? Photo by Thiago Miranda on Pexels.com

I’ve just about finished adding/changing/tuning up the back end of JohnHenry.US. I have a column 95% finished for WeAntiFascists.Com, but I want to go through the same process with that site before I publish (some of that is also already done). Then I’ll do it again with Custode.Org, in preparation to get a whole bunch of things rolling there that I’m not prepared to discuss in any greater detail than “a whole bunch of things.”

As part of the whole membership thing I was discussing at the top of the newsletter, I’ve also gone through and rearranged/simplified the user groups and permissions on the site. As of right now either you’re a “supporter” or a “subscriber.” Subscriber is the default group you’re in when you register with the site, and allows for things like posting to the forum. “Supporter” is the group you’re in if you contribute financial support; that’s the group that will see this newsletter when it’s published rather than a week later.

Those of you who are already registered supporters right now are also part of the Legacy user group, which is mostly just for my own internal record-keeping mostly to ensure I’m staying in touch with you about any sorts of new offers or perks or whatever become available to supporters going forward, which those folks should by rights qualify for retroactively as most of them are among the group of people who has been keeping me and my work alive the last few years.

These changes may make some things funky on your end that I can’t see from here. If so, let me know via the contact form. Note that if you’re logged in you have access to a higher-priority contact form, which you’ll find in the site navigation menu (It’s under “Forums & Account”)! You can also contact me directly through DM at Patreon if you’re a Patron.

Fun fact: what’s actually going to happen is I’m creating this post twice. Once that will post now and is visible only to subscribers, and the other that will post in a week and be visible to everyone. This replicates the functionality of Patreon without having to get too crazy. Plus then if I get a little chaotic or whatever and “forget” to shut off the original, it’ll still be in place and ultimately I’ll just add a 301 redirect to the non-paywalled version of the article so all the traffic goes to that one, and then this actual post goes byebye.

I’m gonna wrap it up and get out of here, get this posted, and see what else I can get done before I try to wrap up and have a bit of a weekend.

May 12, 2023
I Shouldn’t Have To (2010)

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BfxTj7_V8c[/embedyt]

“I shouldn’t have to press 1 for English, this is America!” Another recurring theme that shouldn’t have occurred in the first place. As you can see from the screenshot/featured image for this article, which was captured on 25-March-2021, it’s still occurring.

I’m not even going to bother with all the reasons this kind of bigoted, ignorant thinking sucks; anyone with an IQ above room temperature knows the arguments backwards and forwards. This video is pure bias reinforcement, shot spontaneously outside my home in Kalamazoo at the time. It’s not likely nor intended to move any bigot who thinks this way. It’s intended to be something others who feel the way I do about this ignorance can share when they encounter it in the wild, to reinforce and normalize the idea that we’re out here and not going away, and we won’t be gaslighted into hiding in a closet to please bigots.

March 25, 2021