My Two Facebook Accounts - FAQ

I have two Facebook accounts, one as Steve Hayes and the other as Stephen Hayes. 

As I am frequently asked about this I thought I should write a blog post to answer the most frequently asked questions (FAQ) to save a lot of typing every time I'm asked. 

The short answer is that I hoped to use the Steve Hayes account as a general one for keeping in touch with family and friends, and the Stephen Hayes account (which is linked to my author page on Facebook) for keeping in touch with people who have read books I have written, or might want to read them, or are generally interested in books, literature and writing. 

The story is more complicated than that, however.

At the time of writing this, I only have access to my Stephen Hayes account on my computer, and I only have access to my Steve Hayes account on my phone. 

Using a phone for Facebook is OK for  for quick scrolling to see what is happening and recording "reactions" to people's posts in the hope that that will encourage Facebook's algorithms to continue showing those people's posts to me. The phone also works for video links. The phone is not good for comments or replies other than facile one-liners. So anything that requires thoughtful replies longer than a line or two I save for my computer, and that means I'm using the "Stephen Hayes" account, which has fewer followers/friends, and therefore doesn't always work. 

I used to have full access to my Stephen Hayes account (and my author page) from my laptop computer (using Firefox on Windows 7), but that was stolen in October 2023, and appears to be irreplaceable.

I used to have full access to my Steve Hayes account on my desktop computer (using the Maxthon browser on Windows XP), but since about September/October  2023 Facebook has been tossing me out after about 20-30 seconds, so I just have time to see that someone has a birthday, but not enough time to send them birthday greetings. And if I want to see if there is an update to the Maxthon browser that might work better, it takes me to the Maxthon Facebook page, which tosses me out after 20 seconds. And in case anyone asks about that, I used the Maxthon browser because it worked on Facebook when most other browsers didn't. It was the last resort.

I do have limited access to my Stephen Hayes account from my desktop computer, however, using Firefox Version 41 (less bloated than newer versions, and also more secure, since it runs NoScript). It keeps telling me that my browser is not supported, and that I'm not getting the full benefits of Facebook, but it does let me read and comment on posts. 

As for why I have two Facebook accounts, that goes back several years. 

I originally had only the Steve Hayes account back when Facebook was only for current students in tertiary education. Then suddenly Facebook blocked my access to my account unless I downloaded and installed an undescribed piece of software on my computer. I suspected that the thing they wanted me to install was some kind of spyware, and refused to download it, and opened another account in the name of Stephen Hayes as a kind of emergency account to keep in touch with people. If any of my friends on the other account asked to be friends on the new one, I accepted them, but I didn't solicit friends other than people I needed to be in frequent contact with.

After a few months Facebook unblocked the Steve Hayes account and dropped the demand that I install the unknown software, so I began using the Steve Hayes account for most things again, but kept the Stephen Hayes one for emergencies, and eventually started using it mainly for literary stuff, as described above. 

But right now (December 2023) I use whichever account gives me access on the device which I happen to be using at the moment, and the kind of access Facebook gives me to either account on which device seems to change from week to week. Last week when I tried to go into the Steve Hayes account from my computer, all I saw was a blank black screen. Today I can see everything on the screen, but only for 20 seconds or so. 

Tomorrow it may work, or it may not. It depends on whatever torments the UX (User Experience) boffins at Facebook are thinking up next. I just wish they would take seriously the adage "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." But that's too much to ask.

For more reliable communication, use email. 

 

Why has Blogger lost its search function?

 Blogger now won't let me enter anything in the search box.

Are the people at Google out to kill Blogger and blogging?

Why this reduced functionality?

They made the "Blog This" function post garbage. See, for example, my Simple Links blog, which I used as a straight blog, that is, a web log of sites visited that I might want to refer to again. The "Blog This" feature worked well for that purposes, as well as for quoting extracts from other sites to quote in blog posts. Then Google decided to "improve" it, which made it useless for any purpose at all -- have a look at Simple Links to see how "improved" it is.

They made the editor a lot more difficult to use too. So much so that I went back to LiveJournal, until they decided to go one better than Blogger by making their editor not only more difficult but impossible to use.

All the blogging platforms seem to be in an intense rivalry to produce the worst UX (user experience) ever.

The end of the road for Facebook?

It  looks as though it may be the end of the road for Facebook and Twitter, at least for me and some of my friends. And possibly for other social media as well, including this blog. So I'm posting this just in case my friends, if any, would like to keep in touch if the various social media we've used for the last 20 years or so become inoperative.

 If you would like to keep in touch, try one of these

For close friends, people I've met personally who would like to keep in touch, pass on news and so on, there is the Social Proximity forum, where we can retain social proximity even if we have to keep physical distance because of geography or diseases like Covid. See here: Social Proximity.

For acquaintances, including online acquaintances, who would like occasionally to chat about anything and everything, there is the Off Topic forum, where nothing (well, almost nothing) is off topic. See here: Off Topic.

And for those who prefer more focused discussions on particular topics, there are these:

• Christianity & Society -- Christianity in relation to current affairs, politics, social justice, arts, literature, culture, war & peace, including mission, evangelism and missiology
• Inklings -- Christianity and literature, especially in relation to the Oxford Inklings (C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams Tolkien et al, and similar authors. Share what you are reading or writing and what you think of it. 
• Orthodox Mission & Missiology -- Mission, evangelism and mission history of the Orthodox Church any time over the last 20 centuries.

See here for more contact info if we lose touch via Facebook, or this blog.

What is happening to Facebook?

The people at Facebook decided to give ity a "new look, which for many people turned out to be a bad User Experience (UX).

When Facebook started, they were a big success because of their simple, clean and fast user interface, which was so much better than other clunky social media sites like MySpace and SixDegrees.

Their new user interface seems to bear a remarkable resemblance to the old MySpace one, which Facebook displaced.

As a result several of my friends have already left Facebook, or threatened to, and a lot of other people will be using Facebook a lot less than they used to, including my. This morning I wanted to take a quick look at Facebook to see if any friends had any messages for me, and to look at a couple of interesting articles that frioents had shared, and I had shared too to be able to find them again, when I didn't have time to read them than. But Facebook would not let me. First I had to "Get Started" on their new interface, and they would not let me do anything else until I had done that.

I really didn't have time for that crap, so I closed Facebook and went to Twitter. It showed notifications of "Recent Tweets" -- in other words, nothing to see here, move along, nobody has interacted with anything you tweeted. So move along I did.

And now the people who run this blogging platform have threatened. like Facebook, to replace the current usable user interface with a slow, awkward dysfunctional one, so any time I post anything here, I'm aware that this blog post may be my last.

The people who write the software for these things seem to think they can improve things by adding bells and whistles and taking away pistons and cylinders. They go for eye-candy and glitzy layout, relying on the speed of modern hardware to cover for their lack of programming skills.

The trouble is that those of us who can't afford to buy the latest and greatest hardware have to put up with software that slows to a crawl. and "minimalist" icons that are so mall and faint on the screen that you need a magnifying glass to see them. So eventually we just give up.

So I'm reminded in many ways of the old Queen song, and that is my message to any of my friends or former friends who may be reading this:

Do you hear my call, though you're many years away?
Do you hear me calling you?
Write your letters in the sand
for the day I take your hand
in the land that our grandchildren knew.