There was a time when we all hated fellow users of Facebork for the non-stop invitations we constantly got to play those stupid games that only morons would play, like Candy Crush and all its annoying rivals back to Farmville. The invites kept on coming. Only by shouting at the stupid Facebork users could we stop them.
They still come but less so.
Next, we kept finding ourselves auto-joined to ‘groups’ we didn’t ask to join. This then meant our timelines would fill with posts from the groups we didn’t want to see. God was that so annoying. No invites, just thwack, there you were all joined up to a group you couldn’t give a fuck about. And woe thrice woe anybody who got email alerts every bloody time somebody posted in the group they’d not asked to join. Away for a day or two and you’d return to an inbox full of email notifications of contributions to the group that nobody wanted to be part of. Indeed, most of the notifications would be of posts to the group itself from bewildered joinees who never asked to join, complaining about having been forced to join the group.
That seems to have quietened down.
So, what’s the latest annoying thing appearing in timelines? Well, I reckon it has to be these sites that find a not very amazing video on Youtube or wherever and then wrap around a million different adverts on their own little site, and automatically post a link to the whole thing on a ‘Friend’s’ timeline as if it was they themselves deciding to post it.
Cleverly, these annoying posts have comments you think are written by your Friend like, “This is so funny, you won’t believe it. Watch the bit at the end, I wasn’t expecting that”, “This honestly is the cutest cat/dog/rabbit/worm/fish/baby/child/foetus I’ve ever seen”, or “This is amazing. What happens next?” and so on and so on and so bloody on.
Yet, it ain’t your damn ‘Friend’ saying that, it’s this automated spam site putting things on their timeline complete with comments that you think they’ve made.
Now, a lot of the sites will play the video or whatever when you click on it, but the deviously clever ones will only play the video when you too have spammed all your ‘Friends’ with a link to it as well. So, that’s how it multiplies like the virus from hell.
Sadly, Facebork now operates an algorithm that shows less and less of your Facebork Friends’ actual posts to you, in favour of a kind of ‘Best Of’ which is based on how much you bothered to read of their previous stuff. If their ‘previous stuff’ was this automated “You must see this” spam, then that’s what you’ll get more and more of. Meanwhile, a real Friend who might have been posting responsibly and even have said something that would really interest you, will get lost and forgotten, and might not even get picked by Facebork to appear in your timeline.
This ‘Best Of’ (or ‘Highlights’) almost renders pointless the whole process of keeping Facebork as a method of keeping in touch. However, nothing can be more pointless than bloody “You must see this” posts.
Facebork is certainly taking the ‘social’ out of ‘social networking’.
England's England 