Doug's Rant #4: Yet More Facebook Stupidity, A.I. and Canva For Video
Doug’s wild world of adventures in social media continue… Every now and then you just have to RANT! To be clear, these are indeed rants but there should be a little value here too. It’s not just a rant in the literal sense. Merriam-Webster defines a rant as “a bombastic extravagant speech” but in dialectal British as “a rousing good time” - I’m hoping this is both. Hehe…
3 More Examples of Facebook Stupidity
Let’s start with Facebook and what a joke it often is - they make it so easy to rant. And remember - I LOVE Facebook. I also hate Facebook… A few things in particular have made me crazy there lately. We’ll focus on three of them:
1. Facebook sending us on a wild goose chase just to find the damn “Edit Video” button. The Edit Video button is kind of important. It’s especially important at the end of a livestream that you want to remain in your page content since it’s recorded directly on the platform and you may want to pick the thumbnail, add captions, tags - you know……..EDIT it???? One day it just disappeared.
Facebook loves to do this. The first rep I chatted with had no clue about the button. The second rep asked if I checked Creator Studio. Oh - Creator Studio! You mean the creator studio they launched in 2017 with a ton of features that mostly didn’t work and that they sunset (or so I thought) back in 2018 - that Creator Studio? Not quite. That was Facebook Creator (no studio). This is now Facebook Creator Studio - right - the one they then launched in 2020 that never really allowed you to create anything. Yep. And there it was - the Edit Video button - in Creator Studio at the separate Creator Studio website with its own URL (yeah that makes sense)! Oh, but Creator Studio is now being combined with Facebook Meta Business Suite…. so that tip has an expiration on it. Another creator-thing going away. What a shame. So yes I was eventually able to find the button, temporarily kinda. You see there are so many layers to multiple interfaces and links in the pages/meta/business/creator/WTFFFFFFFFFFF…… that you can’t remember the 5 step/link/button sequence that led you to the Edit Video button again if you tried, and even if you did remember it the sequence and location will change by the next time you try it anyway.
And then…….the button reappeared in the spot it used to be in in the graphic above! Okay that was ONE of the spots it used to be in anyway - it was actually about the third spot. And then…..it disappeared AGAIN.
As of this blog post I don’t know where the button is.
2. Liking posts on Facebook is potentially abuse? One day I was simply scrolling through my feed as one of my pages - the Frameable Faces Photography page (shameless link there I know) and I suddenly got this:
Huh??? I was merely scrolling through the feed, liking and commenting on the posts I liked - posts from vendors, friends of the studio, neighboring businesses in the community. I’m guessing I liked around 20 posts maybe? It’s not like I applied a bot to like 10,000 posts within a 20 mile radius in a span of 2 minutes. I was clearly just using the platform the way its meant to be used. Stupid. I provided a little “feedback”. As they explain below they won’t actually review the feedback, but it will still help. Wait what?
3. I don’t even know what this is…
Anyone care to try to interpret this? MAYBE - certainly not likely - but maybe it would help you if I provided you with the additional “…”. Except you see, there WAS no “…”. What you see above was it. It just trails off into a black hole mid-word. No insights available on a post I had paid to boost for two weeks because you can only get insights on the original post of a shared post of….. Okay stop right there. Isn’t the original post of a shared post by definition NOT an original post? WHAT THE HECK ARE THEY TALKING ABOUT????????? Only if you own the original post - of the shared post? Or the original post OF the shared post, which isn’t an original post? Is there someone’s face I can punch?
Okay can we move on from Facebook to the next topic? Please?
I am not interested in using Chat GPT or any other type of A.I. to write for me.
I read an article in Apple News entitled What A.I. Will Make Better - and Much, Much Worse that struck home for me summing up all the hype about Chat GPT and A.I. in general for me. And as I thought, validated my feeling that I’m not interested. I’m not saying it has NO use for anyone, just not for me at least for now. I suspect that for entrepreneurs, small business owners and obviously true creatives I’m on the right side of history here. I actually want to write my own blog posts. I enjoy it, and Doug Cohen can’t be pieced together like a puzzle by a machine even with complete access to the entire Internet better than actual Doug Cohen. MY thoughts are mine. I suppose if you’ve been tasked with something so basic that it’s just busy work and won’t really represent you anyway then go for it. But please, do NOT let imposter syndrome EVER tempt you to turn to Chat GPT or any A.I. just to play it safe. As Shumita Basu and Nilay Patel discuss in the piece (also available there as a podcast), there is still a big difference between machine learning and sentient machine thinking. We’re still a long way away. I was pretty happy to hear someone with more knowledge about it than me confirm this.
Okay Canva is amazing I know this - time to start using it for video.
I love Canva for so many reasons and I won’t go into a deep dive about it here, but the next frontier on Canva for me is video. I’ve been using iMovie forever, but I think Canva might be easier, and I use Canva for so much else when it comes to graphics - my brand hub is there with the colors, fonts, logos of my various brands and clients - I think I may have to move in that direction. I made the little video above of my cats Luna and Fiona from when they were kittens putting it into a graphic with the text with Canva and it couldn’t have been easier. My old social media pal Katie Lance actually just made a video about Canva video editing - she’s always great for tips so I've got that for you below.
Okay I think I’m done lol. I said that rant #3 wasn’t as “ranty” as usual so I had to make up for it this time! Let me know your thoughts - or your rants! Feel free! Thanks for reading.
M10 Social is owned by Doug Cohen in West Bloomfield, MI and provides social media training and digital marketing services from the Frameable Faces Photography studio Doug owns with his wife Ally. He can be reached there at tel:248-790-7317, by mobile at tel:248-346-4121 or via email at mailto:doug@frameablefaces.com. You can also connect with Doug on Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram, and/or M10 Social on Twitter or Facebook, and check out his other biz www.VirtualPetcations.com while you’re at it!
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