Monday, April 18, 2011

Why I Dumped My Personal Facebook Account For a Fictional Character Page

Botgirl Questi Facebook Business Page
I broke up with my personal Facebook account this weekend. We've been fighting for years. You might say we had irreconcilable differences: I valued my time and wanted to control my awareness; she was determined to waste my time and used any means possible to steal my attention.

She tagged me in photos I didn't appear in just to make me look. She added me to an endless deluge of spam groups that flooded my gmail inbox. She begged me relentlessly to play stupid games and kept my news badge blinking like a strobe light with a constant flow of event invitations. Blah. Blah. Blah.

I hear what you're thinking. I do take some of the blame. Okay. Maybe even most of the blame. It's always been a marriage of convenience. I never loved her. I never even really like her. I just wanted to use her for her connections. But I couldn't handle them. The never ending flood of Photoshopped avatar faces and the mind-numbing cacophony of trivial chatter was too overwhelming.

Finally, on Friday, I pulled the plug. I took the irreversible step of converting my personal account to a business page and claimed my true nature as a fictional character. Even though I lost my Facebook history and every single post, link, photo and video I'd ever shared; even though many of my 1,971 friends would spurn the new one-sided relationship and unlike my new page; it was the right thing to do.

So now that I'm available, come out and see me sometime.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

so seems like you simply couldn't handle privacy settings and hiding posts/apps from people you don't really care about? Let's be honest, it's hard to follow up 500 people, not to mention nearly 2k people. is that really how many friends you got? Looks like you're blaming facebook for what you could've expected it to become. An advertising platform.

Botgirl Questi said...

Hey, I admitted I was also to blame! ;)

You're right. It's nearly impossible to attend to more than a few hundred active Facebook friends unless you have a tremendous amount of time on your hands or a bunch of executive assistants on payroll.

There are a few ways people handle this situation who use Facebook as both a personal and a marketing medium:

- Create lists of those you really care about and ignore your wall

- Hide the vast majority of so-called friends

- Only look at responses to your posts

Until the recent switch, I ended up choosing door number three most of the time, which I thought was the least dastardly strategy. But it's still dishonest in a sin-of-omission kind of sense.

So now I'm where God and Facebook want me to be . . . on a fictional fan page.

Unknown said...

Just do what you like but do not put drama on that topic - it is not needed. i wish you all the best on your way, i also run a business facebook page as well as a personal page, but i know how to report, block or ignore ppl. :-)

Best regards
meer

Xue Faith said...

I'm not too clear on the difference... in your old "person" page, you had a page and it interacted with other "people & pages" on FB...

now in your new "fictional character" page, you have a page and it interacts with other people & pages on FB...

What is the difference?

And IDK you could actually have a "page" without also being a "person"... I thought a page was something 1 or more people created... hahaha... I guess no one knows less about FB than me! :P

Botgirl Questi said...

Meerkat: Although I sometimes rant about a Platform's community, in this case I was just sharing a hopefully humorous account of my ongoing relationship with Facebook.

Xue: There are big differences between a personal account versus a business page. One is that I no longer have any friends under this account, since I'm not claiming to be a person. If others want to keep up with what I post, they "like" the page instead of friending me