Okay, I’m going to give a review or critique of USA.Life as a social media platform (SMP), to the extent that I’ve tried it out thus far.
For context, I came here looking for an alternative SMP to “Fakebook,” as I like to call it. FB’s functionality wasn’t the problem, nor was its base of contacts. I wanted to leave because of its liberal ideology, and its actions to promulgate the lies of the Democratic Party and other socialistic political entities.
So, at first glance, when I was researching various possible SMPs to join, I was looking for three things: a conservative alternative to the liberal/socialist agenda of Fakebook; a base of likeminded individuals and a place to invite my friends and family to join; and a user-friendly platform in terms of functionality.
USA.Life definitely scores well on the conservative alternative front. I consistently see the focus of USA.Life itself on conservatism in general and support of President Trump in particular. There are also other conservatives and people of faith here, which bodes well.
However, on the other two fronts—membership base and user-friendly functionality—USA.Life is quite inadequate. Regarding membership, part of that inadequacy isn’t exclusively USA.Life’s fault. I was hoping for a place where friends from Fakebook would join us. My wife and I have both joined and invited friends to follow us, but so far for me only one has joined. I am open to making new friends here, and have accepted a request or two. But it’s slow going so far, and actually difficult to interact with them here the way we interacted on Fakebook.
Which brings me to the functionality issue. USA.Life is far from user-friendly. Doing searches isn’t easy. Even connecting with the friends I have made here isn’t easy. For example, I just tried to contact the one friend (besides my wife) who followed me from Fakebook. I couldn’t find how to access here page here, or message her. I clicked on her image as my friend, and he prompt only offered for me to unfriend her, not access her page or message her.
I have asked questions on my page, and there is no evidence of an answer. And I have a lot of difficulty finding my own previous posts, because my page has been inundated with political posts. Granted, the political views are more in line with my own than Fakebook’s, but if the sheer volume of them on my page means I can’t even find my own posts without scrolling down the page for 37 minutes, then I don’t call that “user-friendly.”
We have questions on how to make this work, but the FAQs here are pretty basic and aren’t really helpful. And there seems to be no way to contact an administrator to ask more detailed questions.
I’m not ready to give up on USA.Life or leave it just yet, but my issues must be addressed. So as for my critique, while I applaud the idea (and ideology) of this alternative SMP, if I can’t get past the practical and functional issues I’m encountering, I probably won’t be staying. The responses to this post will hopefully improve the situation, not exacerbate the problem.
