Chuckling-ish.
As I entered Facebook just now, a large stern notice filled my screen. It said I was being punished, restricted from doing some stuff I don’t do — posting videos and other stuff — because I have offended their sensibilities.
Don’t know what they mean, especially since, as an illustration, they showed me someone else’s Facebook post with pictures of Bo Nix and Donald Trump. I recognized the post: I’d seen it and shared it with my mishpocha because Nix (Broncos’ QB) had criticized something Trump had said and I approved.
FB has warned me if I continue this behavior (?), behavior which offends their general community spirit policies (?), I just may be bounced off Facebook altogether.
I dunno. I’m so not flummoxed. If this is a sign of shifting FB policies set in place to protect Trump’s frazzled feelings from our truthful, factual and appropriately nasty comments…well, FB will be going down the tubes very soon. Because if they bounce me and other offensive people off the site, I suspect we’ll all stay bounced.
Let me point out that Facebook is free, but depends upon selling advertising to make money. Advertisers buy space on Facebook depending on how many potential customers Facebook can offer them. If Facebook loses users, advertisers will shave their Facebook ad budget.
And of course — as I keep reminding everyone who complains fearfully to me about how FB, and other social media, know everything about them, is our 21st century Big Bro — we do not have to buy whatever they’re pushing at us! That’s the whole thing about business, big or small: they are selling their product to us potential consumers and we do not have to buy what they’re selling, even when their algorithms (or whatever) have picked up our casual internet curiosity about, oh, say, one-foot tall platform shoes.
As I typed “going down the tubes” up there ⇑, I reminded myself at how irritated I was with Olympic events’ expert commentators whose comments consisted entirely of clichés. Thus, I am checking myself over “going down the tubes.” What tubes? Who first said it?
This is where Perplexity shines light into the darkness:
“Going down the tubes” is an American idiom meaning that something is failing badly, being ruined, or being wasted beyond recovery.
And who first used that expression?
The earliest known use of the idiom “going down the tubes” (in the sense of being wasted, ruined, or lost) appears in print in the mid‑1950s, in a U.S. sports context. One frequently cited early example is from the Charleston Daily Mail in May 1954, in an interview with shot‑putter Parry O’Brien, where the phrase “down the tubes” is used figuratively; many etymologists treat this as the earliest attested citation.
I’m now going to publish this and, per usual, post it on Facebook and Bluesky.