I confess, I am a Facebook user. Yes, I hate using Facebook. But I still use it anyway. Why? Well, I sort of have to.
You see, in the area where I live, the small town of Taos, New Mexico, people are Facebook addicts. This is true of many places in the world. Facebook has more than replaced the Internet for many people. Their entire social lives revolve around the damned blue and white digi-crack, for various depressing reasons. I'm sure you've probably noticed this in your area too. People just snort that blue and white shit up their noses like it's free pure Colombian coke mixed with with Walter White's special brand of blue meth. Sad.
Where I live, it is because out here in the middle of the desert, in the poorest county in the poorest state in the nation, there is little to do except errands and stuff in your own house. You can only spend so much time doing errands, so that leaves doing stuff in your own house to fill in most of the rest of the time. This is how the place got to be so famous as a haven for artists. It's the perfect place for a painter because the colors are pretty out here and you can sit around and paint lilacs or mountains or people or any combination of the three all day, seven days a week, and no one will interrupt you because no one even knows you exist!
But this is an issue if you like having a social life, or if you are trying to get anyone to buy your paintings. For the most part, everybody else is far too busy doing errands and stuff in their own houses like painting to bother coming over to your house, even if you are having an awesome party or are giving out free popsicles! Sure, there are a handful of places you can see other people, like Cid's Grocery Store (the true social center of the area), the Hanuman Temple (where all the hippies hang out so they can get free food), TaosSatva (where people come together for ecstatic dance sessions), The High Frequency Loft (where you can do all kinds of fun things), and Taos Plaza (nobody's there most of the time except the shop owners).
I love my Taos friends. But I almost never get to see them, because even though I live here, I am touring the country with my father, Michael Martin Murphey, most of the time. And that's great, because its a way more fun and much better way for me to make a living than any job I could possibly have in Taos, because Taos jobs pretty much suck across the board. Anyone who lives in Taos can confirm that.
But not many people go to any of these social places very often because not many people even exist out here. When there are a lot of people here, it is usually because they're here temporarily to see some big band like Mumford and Sons that the Town of Taos just blew all our tax money on bringing out (and wants to charge us for admission to attend, on top of that). When that happens, most of the locals are even less social because the roads are not built to deal with that many people and if you leave your house, it feels like you are stuck on a freeway during rush hour in Los Angeles.
So to give themselves the illusion of having a social life, a lot of people sit around on Facebook for hours and hours a day, posting about the most boring possible crap, like what groceries they just bought, why Trump sucks (I agree, but I'm sick of hearing about it), how they're holding love in their hearts for the victims of the latest major tragedy, or something equally lame that I have seen millions of times. People are so self-centered and have so much spare time on their hands that they will literally spend the entire day on Facebook posting about boring crap and commenting on everyone else's boring crap. I used to be one of those people.
Recently, I got so sick of witnessing the extreme lameness of Facebook that I installed a Google Chrome extension called "Kill the Feed" that removes the feed entirely from my Facebook. If you have a similar problem and don't want to hear everyone whine and say "look and me" all day long, Google and install that shit! It made Facebook much less sucky, but it's still sucky and I am guessing it is only a matter of time before it will become totally irrelevant.
Anyway, I digress. So why do I still use Facebook?
I use Facebook to find out about events, and to post pages for my own events, because this is basically the only way to find out about cool shit you can go to in Taos or to let other people know about the cool shit you are putting together. That's about it. I also use it as a sort of email inbox for anyone who needs to get ahold of me but doesn't use email anymore because (you guessed it) Facebook has replaced email for them too! But that's it. That is all Facebook is useful for for me. The feed can go to hell. Facebook is not worthy of my thoughts. If someone wants to know my status, they can call me or private message me. And I don't give a shit about anyone else's statuses. If a friend's status really merits my attention, then they can call or text my ass. Even then, I still might not care enough to spend more than a moment on it. I really do my best to get back to everyone who contacts me, but sometimes, they get nothing in return for their novel-sized texts but a thumbs up emoji or a "sorry you're feeling like that" response. You see, I just don't care to engage with anyone unless it seems like it will be worth my time. And often, it isn't.
Sure, there are other media outlets, but they are in many ways even more lame than Facebook. There is one newspaper in town called The Taos News. I use to work for them, selling ads. Their big headlines have to do with stuff like parking meters increasing by $0.50 per hour, some lame old modern art guy with a bunch of money who just opened a gallery, and various drug busts. Typical small town newspaper crap. Sure, there are a few small articles by local people who don't work for the newspaper that can be good. And I like the Tempo editor Rick Romancito because it's clear than he doesn't give a rat's ass what anyone else thinks of him (makes for very entertaining movie reviews), and because he usually covers my events when I send him press material, but is the newspaper worth $1. Some weeks yes. Other weeks, no.
But apparently, despite being such a snob, I think it is worth spending my time posting to Steemit. Why? Because here, you might actually get paid ranting about something if other people like it. More than that, Steem is not an evil mega-corporation. I mean for all we know it could be an evil scheme, but at least it's not big enough to be the kind of scheme that Facebook is. My wife, though she hates Facebook and terminated her Facebook account years ago, is all about Reddit. And Steemit is basically like Reddit, except that you can actually get paid in cryptocurrency to rant! What could be better?
Well, truly, there are a lot of better ways for me to spend my time, and most of the time, I am doing one of those things, like playing my harp or writing my book or cuddling with my wife or mixing phat beats or planning halloween parties. I am good at entertaining myself, even in a small town. But Steem is interesting to me and worth my time because of all places on the Internet, it seems the best place to rant!
But Steem, despite not sucking as much as Facebook or Trump, still kinda sucks. Why? It has nothing to do with the idea. It is a brilliant idea. It could be an idea that changes the world. It's already made some awesome content creators a lot of money. I hope it makes them (and me) even more money.
But right now, at the current stage of its evolution, Steem still sucks. Why? It doesn't work very well. Half the time I click the UPDATE POST button, it says something like NETWORK ERROR, and nothing happens. I cannot seem to add images to my own post. I don't know if it's because everything on Steemit is somehow being processed by the Steem mining network or if it has to do with blockchain congestion, or if there just aren't enough servers, but it's a big problem that seems to have plagued Steem since the beginning. Someone needs to do something about this. Steemit is literally the least functional website I have ever used. Buttons only work half the time.
So I'll stay on here for a bit and see what happens, but a website could not pay me enough to contribute if contributing means hitting the same button hundreds of time, hoping that at some point, the button will do what it's supposed to do. In this way, Steemit sucks even more than Facebook and Trump. But at least Steemit gives a shit about me enough to pay me to tolerate how lame it is, and when people do manage to get content up on Steemit, it can often be worth reading, so it's not all bad. I just hope Steemit can grow it's IT infrastructure fast enough to keep up with the demand of all the people who want to post on it. If it can't it will die. And it's not looking promising at the moment. But if it can get its shit together, then Steem could be really great!