Facebook is killing dogs.
The lengthiest comment thread in facebook's community forums is about an unannounced experiment they are conducting on some fan pages, in which comments are placed in random order, depriving those Pages of the ability to have conversations in comment threads. Not one user wants it or likes it. As a matter of policy, facebook does not respond to customer or tech support issues.
A disproportionate number of the users complaining are animal rescuers - for some strange reason, the problem seems to be especially acute with dog rescue Pages.
They have described the effect as tragic. Dogs are dying. The rescues have been using comment threads to organize the logistics involved in rescue. Springing dogs from shelters, arranging transport, raising money. That is no longer possible. Many, many dogs who would otherwise have been saved have been killed in shelters as a direct result.
Users have been complaining en masse to facebook for over two months now. Of course they have been vocal in letting facebook know that this is causing a massacre of dogs. Lots of desperate all caps comments.
The reason comments are presented in random order now is because on some Pages - Pages only, not personal pages or Groups - facebook is experimenting to see if randomizing comment order will increase engagement. Facebook never informed any of the targets of this. People flailed about for solutions for months, thinking it was a tech issue. Finally, a facebook exec told the web site Mashable that it was an experiment.
It comes down to the fact that facebook's historic failure in its stock offering some months ago has left them scrambling for ways to monetize their system. Probably they will offer to sell back the ability to have conversations in comment threads.
Facebook has not bothered to answer one single complaint or to allow any entity upon which they are conducting this experiment to opt out.
On a page like mine, it doesn't matter. No one is dying. We can seek other venues at leisure.
On rescue pages - and who knows what other ones that have depended on facebook - it most certainly does matter. Animals, and it appears from the complaint threads on fb and elsewhere, especially dogs, are dying.
This seems to me to be a good reason to take the steps necessary to distance TDITC from facebook. Convenience is not enough of a reason to tolerate ruthlessness in blood. It has become hard enough to stomach the greed and ruthlessness being generalized in American business.
I don't know if facebook selected dog-themed Pages to run this experiment on, but dog pages are overrepresented in the comments about this. If the experiment is being conducted on humanitarian or disaster relief pages, too, you can imagine the effects.
Please help get word of this out. Animals are being killed in shelters right now because of this.