By now, most of you have probably seen advertisements for "Meta," the new corporate name for Facebook, the social media monstrosity that has dominated millions (billions?) of lives for over a decade.

Just as that has occurred, several corporations have made a point of dumping Facebook publicly, including beauty supplier Lush: 

Lush has announced it is closing its accounts on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok until the social media sites do a better job of protecting users from harmful content.

The campaigning beauty retailer said it had “had enough” after the allegations of the Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, who claims the company puts profit ahead of the public good.

The Lush chief digital officer, Jack Constantine, said the company would not ask customers to “meet us down a dark and dangerous alleyway”, adding that some social media platforms were “beginning to feel like places no one should be encouraged to go … Something has to change.”

Constantine said the company spent a lot of time inventing products to help people to unwind and look after themselves. Social media platforms had become the antithesis of this, he argued, with algorithms designed to “keep people scrolling and stop them from switching off and relaxing”.

Facebook is a dump. Thinking back over 10 years of using it, I can't think of anything good that ever came out of it. I remember the internet before social media - America Online, etc. People were generally skeptical about talking to anyone they didn't know in real life. This common sense seemed to just disappear for the mass of society when MySpace and later Facebook took off.

Along with common sense went civility and literacy. There used to be internet publications that looked like they had a pretty promising future and message boards that catered to specified interests and were well moderated. All of this vanished with social media and social media just became a huge dumpster for whoever had to take a dump.

When Facebook took off, it was said that MySpace was for teenagers. You first needed a college e-mail address to use Facebook. (This is ancient history, I know.) More sophisticated forms of social media have arisen, like LinkedIn - which is career based. I'm not saying to not use these platforms - I got published in a magazine thanks to LinkedIn - but just be careful and weary of it. There's no guarantee that becoming a dump might just be the nature of social media.

Part of why Dagblog is so wonderful is that it stood the test of the time, still using internet formatting from the turn of the century. It may be that that formula is better than most.