Winaero has always sought to connect with our audience via the network of your choice. As such, we have social media links on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, email and Telegram. Our regular readers have been following Winaero via these networks for a long time. Today we are changing one of our content publishing channels. More specifically, we are ditching Facebook.
If you like Winaero, you can stay in touch with us using the following options:
We also have an RSS feed, and a free email subscription, if you use any of them.
If that's not enough, you can follow my personal accounts or email me:
These pages publish our latest tutorials, software updates, and news.
Starting on November 19, 2019, we are discontinuing the use of Facebook. Here's why we are taking this step.
Back in 2011, Facebook was innovative, exciting and interesting. It was fun to organize and maintain a Facebook community around the web site. However, things changed over the years. Due to very strict rules about who sees our content, nobody can reliably predict what will be delivered to our page's subscribers and when.
Also, Facebook's user interface has been completely ruined and become slower, unfriendly and more hostile to control. It is literally unusable. All its useful options and tools are buried under tons of tabs, JavaScript drop-downs, which are hard to discover. Facebook is the slowest loading, most sluggish, heaviest web site from all the web sites I use. It takes enormous amount of system resources just to publish an update. Posting news there takes too much of my precious time.
Their overzealous security measures which only add to the annoyances are worth mentioning. Every time I sign-in using a cellular connection, Facebook locks me out and unpublishes my updates, citing suspicious location/login behavior. It takes a lot of effort from my side to prove that it was indeed me who logged on using a different device. The unpublished content remains inaccessible to its intended audience. This is highly infuriating.
Facebook today has draconian behavior towards content publishers. They have invented ridiculous content publishing rules, which are ambiguous and vague. Despite publishing only links to our own website on our own Facebook page, they repeatedly warn us of some unknown policy violations and despite asking them repeatedly what these were exactly, Facebook will not reveal anything.
More recently, we faced some unacceptable behavior from Facebook. For some unspecified reason they directly suspended our page. Starting in October 2019, they were giving warnings without being specific about anything but vaguely stating community rules violation. I am aware of their rules, and have also checked them once again for any revised policies. Winaero has done nothing to violate them. What's worse is that Facebook's support is refusing to reveal what exactly is being violated.
I find this extremely disrespectful to the page owner. Imagine if I started spontaneously banning everyone who comments on my website or reports bugs in my apps even if they may not be accurate or reproducible. Our audience would find it rude and unacceptable. Facebook's behavior is the same.
In my opinion, Facebook has become a waste of time for no good reason. The value they had was because of their wide reach, not because they were unique in any way for publishing content. So Winaero will no longer post at Facebook; it's best to ditch them for good considering their overall behavior and personal privacy violations from the company. I am removing the Winaero page from there, along with my personal user profile.
While Winaero may retain the Share button for Facebook for our users' convenience who prefer to share content over it, links to the official Winaero page will be removed. With the next update, it will also be removed from Winaero Tweaker.
I hope my point is clear and understandable.
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Though I am not in any social platform, I totally agree with you and respect your decision. FB is sure waste of time. If they don’t need us, we surely don’t need them either!
Yeah, indeed.
I left Facebook a few months ago, after they started blocking peoples posts about the election (and the obvious shenanigans). I was never into politics but they were flagging one particular post, about some formula from some math genius that proved some statistical impossibility regarding vote counts, as adult sexual intimidation. I will never forget that. They went out of their way to apply a shameful reason to a bening discussion over some math formula just to be petty and mean. I agree with you that it was great years ago, cats riding vacuum cleaners and such. Then they suddenly were “woke” or whatever they call it. No fun these days at the Wet-Blanket Woke Facebook. I deleted my content one post at a time, one picture at a time. It took 30 minutes a day for 2 months, but a techie friend said that was the only way to actually delete it from their servers. Otherwise they keep selling it, and I didn’t feel good about Zuckerberg making income off me in any way after the ugliness, and over politics? these people are really messed up. I salute your decision sir. Good day.
Good choice leaving facebook!
It really is the worst of all the social media outlets.
Here’s a comedy video from nine years ago about this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDHb4wewAIQ
Great link! Thank you! (and by the way, I also left FB for good long time ago).
Sounds like a good change and I support it completely. I think FB is only good for close friends who have moved far away to post photos and little stories to share. Their latest idiocy has been showing new postings on a list in what looks like random order so I don’t know what their intentions are at all. Fortunately, I also don’t care.
I use protopage.com for my homepage and have created a widget that always shows the last 6 articles from this site.
I do have FB, with a small list of only family. I’ve recently stopped using it too as it’s mostly just people ‘sharing” crap somone else shared with them, instead of posting original content about themselves.
That’s true. My feed was full of such re-shared content.
It’s a good decision given the way they are behaving. This is most unprofessional from a big company. They are acting like jerks if they won’t clearly state the reason of the ban. Better to just dump them. Facebook is not a highly respected company in most circles anyway.
Nobody trusts them either as their sole aim is to collect as much data about you violating your privacy but then they create these unnecessary obstacles for those who do want to genuinely use the platform for reaching out to more people.
People can still get content from your website via RSS also. Facebook should be ashamed for behaving this way.
Ah, RSS!
Adding to the post. Thanks :-)
Hi Sergey,
I am an RSS subscriber and regular blog reader, and will remain so as long as Winaero stays online. Following Winaero and your own personal account on Twitter is next on my list.
I understand your decision to leave Facebook. If there is anything I can do to advocate on your behalf to Facebook, I will be happy to do so.
Sincerely,
Debby Hanoka
Boca Raton – Florida – USA
Thanks Debby.
I am happy to have readers like you.
I don’t think that dealing with Facebook is worth our time.
Thanks again for your support.
(Apologies to Mad Magazine’s Spy vs Spy)
Sergey the problem is that you are obviously a Russian spy complete with black fedora and matching raincoat sneaking around under Putin’s direct orders and trying to steal the US election
If you just spit out your coffee (or tea) laughing just remember there is always a grain of truth. They have to step on anyone with an IP in eastern Europe to prove they are doing something
Se we are all with you on this. I repeat an old Russian proverb that fits the situation: “Трахни их”
HAHA. I’ll do =)
Thanks for your kind words Rick!
Actually, I will miss your locomotives and other impressive stuff you were sharing. You are one of the best persons I met on the Internet.
Thanks for YOUR kind words. I need to make a locomotive desktop theme and send it to you
Well done, Sergey. You’re too professional and too serious a person to have to bow to Facebook’s arbitrariness. Congratulations on your decision
Bravo! I too recently ditched FB and had them delete my account for most of the same reasons. RSS FOREVER!!!
If I ran a country now, Facebook will have already been banned for serious breaches of privacy laws: by now there would be a nationwide campaign getting Facebook users in my country to take out their data, as well as to promote self-hosted websites and more ethical platforms. Domains and server space are not too expensive nowadays, and having your own website feels like you own part of the internet.
Well tiktok might get banned in the US, that would be one of the biggest benefits to society right now lol
Facebook must fire people who giving warnings without being specific about anything but vaguely stating community rules violation!
Definitely!
MeWe is the best alternative to Facebook.
what is it?I understand, so Facebook is gone so far. I don’t like to have Facebook tbh, so I used other social networks than FB. I never used FB before. And violation thing isn’t a good idea so it must be stooped for good. Sorry for not good English because I’m Korean.
Years ago I was on FB, but they had security issues with phishing with hacked email accounts, so I left.
As for “warnings without being specific about anything”, that’s what happened to me with Yandex. Just one day after sighing up for their email service, they froze it, saying that my account was hacked and that my PC was likely hacked. I talked to their support, but they just lied and were no help at all. In the end, this was just a tactic to get my phone number. See, when I sighed up all i needed was another email. But then they say I’ve been “hacked”, so they need a phone number now to verify it’s me. Thing is, if I was hacked, then how can they trust me now by giving them some phone number now? Well, they can’t. All they have is my confirmation email, but they won’t trust that unless I give them a phone number. It’s not logical.
Bruno, that old hustle is still around my friend. Namecheap tried to play that one on me when I decided to try them out for my domain lease. Said 24 hours to supply date of birth, phone number, social, all that. I have 2 lawyers and a retired state judge in the family, so a letter was sent and they have been quiet ever since. My domain works just fine. This data prostitution is getting out of hand.
Olá, eu gostaria de deixar aqui um relato sobre a opção True Transparency da barra de tarefas, que não está funcionando em muitos computadores. Recentemente descobri que adicionando uma nova chave no registro, resolve:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Dwm create dword32 ForceEffectMode = 1
Antes existia apenas a UseOLEDTaskbarTransparency, porém a microsoft criou essa nova ForceEffectMode
It has been already reported here: https://winaero.com/blog/increase-taskbar-transparency-level-in-windows-10/#comment-34478
Only problem with Winaerotweaker ( and I have the latest version) is that on Windows 10 Home 64 Bit it will sometimes reset the choice I made to “Disable Taskbar Thumbnails” .. That puts it back to showing them again. Not sure if this is a glitch in Winaerotweaker or something Microsoft keeps doing. Needless to say, that is somewhat annoying. Please see if this can be corrected … Thanks
I will take a look.
“We discontinued Facebook
We no longer use Facebook to deliver our post updates.”
I think that was one of your best decisions you ever made. Thank you very much!
Best wishes
Muvimaker
Totally agree, and glad to see more exodus from facebook.
Hello is it possible that I can translate Winaero Tweaker in Dutch
Glad I’m not the only one who realizes FB is the most ultrabloated, ultraparanoid, controlling site ever.
I also applaud you and your efforts to tame the Windows mess with Tweaker.
I tried making a donation this morning but PayPal blew a “sorry too bad” error. Might want to look at that. Contact me anytime. Best of luck.
Facebook also keeps suspending or disabling accounts randomly. Even worse, there are situations such as not receiving SMS messages (when being asked to verify phone numbers). Recently, there have also been Facebook accounts locked with the notice “Try coming back on a phone or computer that you’ve used to log in to Facebook before” with no options to continue. If you’re browsing Reddit, you’ll find so many posts about these.