I continue to pull back from social media, deleting old posts and removing automatic posting from my blog to social media sites. Why?

1) Social media sites are very constraining on layout and design. With paid hosting that I use, I have almost complete freedom in content and design.

2) Social media sites have become swamps of nasty comments and dens of angry people. The nature of easy commenting, makes it easy for people to “flame” and tell you why you are wrong or your ideas lack merit.

3) Facebook is becoming an increasingly closed and proprietary platform. Not only are they very aggressive with censorship, they have all but eliminated the largest developers from using their API. They want users to create “custom content” exclusively for their platform, and not be sharing it from other sites.

4) Facebook not only requires extensive vetting to use their application programming interface, they constantly break their API, requiring countless hours and updates to make your software keep working for them. My Twitter and Instagram code haven’t been updated in years, and they keep plugging along, but Facebook keeps breaking.

Simply said, I like doing my own thing. I don’t want to spend countless hours updating a Facebook page or being limited by a design set out by major corporation. I may lose followers, but I’d rather work on my own blog.