Social Media

I’ve long had a love-hate relationship with social media. Whilst it has the potential to connect people, it’s all too easy to lose the finite hours we have arguing with strangers or being bombarded by the worst that society has to offer, just because someone you know, or someone that person knows has reacted to something that was intended to rile them up.

One bone of contention for me at the moment is Facebook. I don’t want to have a personal Facebook account, but to keep the Cardiff By Bike Facebook page, you must.

The question is, do we really need a Facebook page? Looking at the analytics for the site, most of our traffic comes from search engines, not Facebook. The comments section below allows for discussion on specific posts, search engines bring traffic in and not having Facebook would give me the headspace to actually write what I want to write.

So, I’ve reached a decision where I’m going to close the Facebook page down, as well as my personal page. I appreciate the interactions I’ve had in the past on there, but it’s not the place for me any longer. I rarely see posts from friends; I rarely see posts from pages I follow and I invariably come away from the site feeling empty or angry.

Other social networks may follow, but let’s start with the most pernicious one first.