Facebook: It's NOT What It Used to Be

I long for the good old days. Not back when I was a young kid. And not when I was a teenager either. I long for the good old days of just five years ago. I first joined Facebook in 2011. It's not so much that I want to return to an old job or where I used to live. I just wish Facebook is now what it was then.

I admit I was slow to join the social media party. Heck, I resisted it. But I finally gave in because management above me urged me to do so. As soon as I set up an account new friend requests came pouring in from old friends I hadn't heard from in decades. I caught up with their lives and soon started seeing photos and reading tales of many things I'd missed out on. It...was...awesome!

Fast-forward to 2016 and Facebook is larger and more used than ever. As of the late 2015, approximately 1.6 billion people were on Facebook. That's about 22 percent of everyone who lives on earth. That's crazy!

Having said that, I believe Facebook is a shell of what it once was. Let me explain by setting the table, so to speak, I have both a personal page and a professional page but the place where I spend most of my time when I'm on Facebook is doing outreach on my work page for the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, because that's a component of my job. When I joined RMEF in late May 2012, we had about 25,000 "likes." Just this past week, we rolled over the 420,000 "like" mark. The growth has been tremendous and we hope to keep the ball rolling so we can reach more people to spread the word about the good conservation work RMEF is carrying out.

One thing I've noticed by being logged in to Facebook --and all of social media for that matter-- all day on a daily basis is how people's attitudes have shifted. It used to be that folks would post a photo or leave a personal comment and they were mostly positive. Today, many people use Facebook as a sounding board. And it's not just that either. They go on rants, point fingers and some are even into name-calling. There are people who hate Democrats, hate Republicans, hate government leaders and/or presidential candidates, hate cops, hate cop-haters and the list goes on and on.

We all have different opinions. I'm fine with that but nowadays there's this attitude of "I'm going to make this in-your-face post and you better go along with what I believe or I'm gonna spew hate your way" or "you better believe what I believe or you're stupid." What happened to civility? What happened to decorum? What happened to respect? We can disagree about our political or religious views but we don't have to be over-the-top, in-your-face about it if others don't like it. I've hid posts of several Facebook friends on my timeline because they just pound the same anti-this or anti-that or conspiracy-this or conspiracy-that message every day.

Can we go back to the good old days? No more hate posts. No more impersonal memes. Just friends treating each other like friends?

Wait, did I just go on a personal rant? Sigh...