My Facebook feed is starting to look like my inbox back in the late 90s...
Remember back in the day when everyone started to get into email and sharing messages and photographs was the main reason to use email? It was a new way of communication and sharing personal information and pictures was a cool and painful thing to do. It was painful because images took a while to download with the modems we used to receive these email messages.
Today, most of my Facebook “friends” are family members and close friends, I don’t follow or “friend” people I don’t know personally. For a while, Facebook has been a great source to reconnect with old friends and distant family members. We’ll share photos, messages, comments, etc… However, in the past few months it seems as if most of my Facebook contacts have been attracted or pulled into those non-useful messages that ask you to “like” an image featuring a handicapped person, or a hungry kid, etc…
The “Like This” Chain Status
This is so much like those old “chain mail” campaigns that always have something somewhere telling you to email this or else! This is very unfortunate and expected at the same time, my Facebook feed has reached the point where it looks a lot like my Hotmail account when most of my family and friends started using email and sharing the same things I see in Facebook now like jokes, “funny” photographs they find in the interwebs, “chain mail” like status updates, invitations to play stupid games, etc…
Facebook latest updates are not helping with this, the way the default sort works helps these junk messages to show up on top of my feed as they are the ones with the most comments and likes making them the “top stories” making my Facebook feed unreadable and full of junk information. Yes you can change the sort of your feed, and you can block certain type if updates and invitations, and even some friends that keep on pushing the junk content… and after a while you might even create a new Facebook account where you only connect with really close friends and family in order to avoid the junk information… just like we did with email years and years ago, but I refuse to believe Facebook has become the email of the 90s, and I don’t want to end up having multiple Facebook accounts.
I still have my Hotmail account and I cannot remember the last time I checked it. I know many of my family members and friends keep sending me online jokes, images and chain messages to that account, I am OK with that, I don’t use it anymore, it has become my catch-all junk email account.
Below is an example of the content I am talking about, notice the number of likes and shares…
What to do?
I guess Facebook could do something to help us better filter our feed or even better block those annoying updates that show up on your feed when one of your friends falls for it and click “Like” on even worst, decides to share it publicly. I mentioned above that this behavior and contamination of Facebook is expected, as it is with any network or service that reaches a point where the network effect is so powerful that eventually someone starts to abuse it in this manner. Facebook and all of its users will have a hard time eliminating these type of messages, first because Facebook’s success relies on people liking and sharing content and secondly because most of its users actually enjoy reading, viewing and sharing junk information, unfortunately.
This is a serious problem that is affecting many people who want to use FB to really connect with friends and share things that they care about, and not spend time cleaning and avoiding all these chain statuses which many people seem to enjoy liking and sharing. To see more examples and comments about these FB chain statuses, look at this Tumblr page, showing all messages regarding FB chain statuses.
For now we should just sit and wait to see what happens, in the meantime I am once again looking for a service that can offer image hosting and sharing, and that is easy to use so that my non-technical inclined friends and family members can once again share photos about our family events, kids, vacations, etc… in a platform that will allow us to control the privacy and sharing of our personal media, without bombarding us with ads and other junk content.
Peace out.
