By pretty much any measure, running a popular Facebook page is pretty damn awesome. I get to post things and people like and comment on and share them! I get to share techniques and works in progress and great reference pics and the amazing work of modelers all over the world. I occasionally get responses in weird languages that even Facebook’s little translation tool can’t sort out.

As a nice little bonus, a lot of the little tricks of the trade have proven quite useful to me professionally, as well.

But…it’s not without its annoyances.

Such as dealing with tedious, repetitive questions.

This morning, I woke up to a new comment on a picture of my Corsair I posted last night.

“What scale?”

Now, I’m sure the poster was thinking something like “huh, that looks like a neat kit, I would like to buy one. I wonder what scale it is?” Or perhaps “I can’t tell from the angle if that’s the 1/48 or 1/32 Tamiya kit”.

My reaction, on the other hand, was something more like this:

What scale? WHAT SCALE? I’ve only been working on this thing for THREE *#*!$%#@! MONTHS! What do you think I did, swap it out for a 1/72 kit randomly? 

I was very tempted to answer 1/350.

But here’s the thing. I get this question ALL. THE. TIME. And I know why I get it, too.

It’s all Facebook’s fault.

WARNING —– BORING STUFF TIME —- WARNING

Facebook’s algorithm basically “gates” page posts so that they only reach a small percentage of a page’s followers. This is as it should be. It keeps your news feed from being overrun more than it already is by annoying brand pages that suck at content marketing. The only way to push a post up the tiers to more and more exposure? By hitting certain engagement (i.e likes, comments and shares) levels. Or, you know, paying Facebook.

In effect, this means that someone who likes Doogs’ Models on Facebook may only see something like one in ten of my posts (it varies based on use habits, too…seriously the algorithm is scarily smart). So it sets up this weird sort of news feed relativity, where people reading my posts don’t have the same context that I have posting them.

END WARNING

Of course, knowing what’s going on intellectually doesn’t make such comments any less tedious or repetitive to me, in my specific news feed reality. So when I get questions like:

“What kit is this?”

“What primer is that?”

“What paint is that?”

“What aircraft is that?”

“What is that acrylic rod stand thing?”

“Why do you use black primer?”

…know that I will answer them dutifully and politely, but behind the keyboard I will probably look something like this:

And if you don’t get the title of this post, for the love of god go watch Galaxy Quest. It’s on Netflix right now, so you have no excuse.