Photo by Elke Pfeil for Kitten Central of Placer County

News that Facebook Inc. is again changing its “who sees what” algorithm in a way that just happens to make it more necessary for community groups and small businesses to pay for their messages to be seen — by their own followers —  has a very personal meaning for me.

It means animal rescuers, including myself, will find it even more difficult to save lives. And we don’t have money to “boost” our posts. Right now, that money goes for Kitten Milk Replacer for the orphans.

And it’s not just us. Social media has had an incredible positive impact on do-gooders. We’ve come to depend on it. Facebook is the platform we rely upon the most. Love it and hate it, Facebook is where the faces are.

Already today (it’s not even 9 am), I’ve helped people with three litters of kittens and celebrated the saving of a deaf puppy from the shelter. At 11 last night, we got two handsome boxer mixes off death row (would have been killed today) in less than an hour. They will sleep in a rescue tonight.

Wednesday through Sunday we tried — and eventually succeeded — in catching a little dog who jumped out of her owners’ semi at a local truck stop. With the dog spotted and tracked, but too scared for capture, the owners’ daughter flew in from Denver and after 18 hours the dog came to her. And went home safe from the coyotes in the vineyard.

All of these things were made possible by Facebook, easily the worst product ever adopted by more than a billion people that doesn’t involve inhaling. To be honest, I hate Facebook but love what it enables us to do, almost in spite of itself.

It is hard to tell Facebook gives much of a damn about users. They make changes and changes and changes and what really happens is the platform becomes ever more optimised for making Facebook rich. If that makes it harder to save orphan kittens, that’s my problem, not Zuck’s.

As a one-size-fits-all platform, Facebook must work really well for some group of users, but I don’t know who they are. The rest of us get an inflexible platform that we have little control over.

The recently added Facebook search features are mostly just frustrating. You’d like to see results in date order? Not on this Facebook. Likewise easily sorting and tagging of friends. How about a timeline that is a real history of what I have looked at and done? Or admin features that let us make pages and groups more useful?

More important: Why can’t I tune my own newsfeed? Why can’t I choose how many posts I see from the pages and groups I like? Why can’t I just subscribe? Could notifications work better? Or do I have to stay close to keep from missing a needy animal?

How many animals are saved on Facebook each day? Nobody knows but I’d guess in the thousands. And God bless everyone at Facebook for all the good work the platform enables.

Still, Facebook would be a much better platform for everyone if Facebook enabled users to decide for themselves what they see and how the platform works.

These don’t have to be the default settings, but Facebook needs much better tools for what used to be called “power users” and administrators. And it needs to temper its mercenary ways just a bit. People and organizations don’t understand being asked to pay to reach their friends.

Facebook does a tremendous amount of good. But it could do more and do it better. At least if Facebook cares about kittens. Or its users.

Feature Photo by Elke Pfeil for Kitten Central of Placer County