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About one year ago, I begun discovering horror social media. I was very active on Facebook. I had joined half a dozen horror groups on Facebook to be in touch with other horror-heads like me.
That lasted for about a year. The experience was complex, and I will not say it was either 100% negative nor 100% positive. I’ll deconstruct my Facebook experience below. In the future I’ll write about what I think of horror in other social media sites.
Expectations Before Starting
When I was making up my mind to start using social media to serve my passion for entertaining with horror, I had high expectations.
I had not even lurked on a social media horror group and I was wondering how they were.
I only had experience in horror community web forums and a very little and negative one at that.
I had a vague idea of how it was going to be, due to a general knowledge of social media. The idea I had, coupled with the expectations of connecting to others like me was kind of exciting.
Yet, I couldn’t figure out how to mix with others that are crazy about horror was going to make me feel. So I started joining horror groups on Facebook.
Horror Facebook Negative Side
The speed at which the tech monopolies like Facebook want us to produce, consume and interact and the general pace trends that their systems generate are something to consider and even analyze.
Add to that the inertia that myriads of people centralized in a single channel provoke. It’s a mad, constant, unfocused flood of information.
Like I wrote above, the quality and level of interest the content that the members of these groups shared made for a very frustrating experience.
For some reason it was not possible to stop and smell all the horror carnivore flowers that horror fans shared, they were just too many.
Couple the pains of the two above paragraphs and things with Facebook 2018’s poor means of storing curated things; I gave up after saving 99 shared pieces of content by the horror group members.
It took the platform way too long to look how one’s facebook.com/saved section now looks:
To have to deal with browser plugins to give it a less eye destroying color and the underwhelming old design, I just lost interest in continuing curating anything.
But let’s look at the positive side, Facebook’s new look makes the facebook.com/saved section a much more readable thing now.
I wanted to make public that believe me or not, I stopped saving stuff at exactly 99 pieces of content, weird… Ain’t it?
Horror Facebook Positive Side
My first impression was positive. To see a constant flow of horror fans interacting with each other constantly and on a 24/7/365 basis, kind of impressed me.
My horror enthusiasm is not something that I had developed one, five or fifteen years ago. No way. It was a lifelong obsession that manifested for the first time when I was just fresh out of toddler-hood, at my 4th or 5th year of age.
Going to connect with thousands of horror fans, with the chance of connecting with persons as exhaustive and fastidious as me in the horror department was an extremely exciting thing.
As I made use of the groups I had joined, it made me happy to be able to share my experience for the benefit of other horror fans.
Especially, I liked to be of service to those who were not long-standing horror fans. Persons who didn’t mind asking humble questions. Questions that I replied for their benefit as succinctly and in an actionable way as possible.
I loved to find out the grade of love others have for horror. The horror craftsmanship of the horrorists (mostly amateurs as of yet) I discovered astounded me. The quality and entertainment of the things they shared amused me to no end.
Non-positive Non-Negative Side of Horror Social Media
Besides those things I generalized about in the two previous sections of this post there is another horror crowd that produces content that is more filler than anything else.
I’m talking about shit-posts, silly trivia games played on the groups feeds and similar kinds of valueless content. I can’t give an opinion on that because they don’t produce a negative or positive reaction in me.
It’s just “content” I don’t engage with.
Conclusion
To be able to connect with horror persons and to continue curating further the things they share, using the feature of ordering saves in collections kind of redeems all the negative things I think Facebook is.
It’s not a totally greed-based software after all. Not giving powerful features like these would make the platform unusable for me.
I want to end this rant on horror social media saying what I think are the consequences of saving the stuff others share.
If one wants to take it seriously one must make a list of all the content pieces and the persons that shared them that one saved and contact them to ask them if it’s okay with them for one to re-share their stuff.
This is heavy work, but if the things one saved are cool, it’s well worth it.
I’m not counting the action of re-sharing a post soon after it was originally shared by the original poster, which I think is the ideal.
It’s ideal unless one wants to use the content shared by others as cobbles in a sustained campaign of content sharing.
Something that might be seen as wrong by many, but in fact is a powerful vehicle for consistently making a point about something.
I kept it as ethical as I could all this time, always giving credit the correct way with the full name of the sharer and link to the original content. Also, when my contribution to the re-shared content was negligible, I took always special care to tag the content as #rebloged or #reshared.
On top of that, I keep an Impressum on my blog and on the site’s Facebook page, naming all those from whom I used content as resources in my own content creations. I update these documents quarterly only, though.
What is/was your Horror Social Media Experience?
Let it all out in the comments below
Photo Credits
Randen Pederson
Martin Lewison
John
Spider.Dog
David Williams
© Bholenath Valsan 2021 — Facebook – Horror Social Media Analysis
