I was a huge fan of facebook. Like ginormous. You guys remember. Heck, I even I have a facebook category tag. And then a bunch of stuff happened and it seemed like facebook was out to get me. Seriously. They kept instituting new features designed to punch me in the face. Which, honestly, was just NOT NICE. And then I found out that there were people getting hurt worse than I was:
“…a new version of the site’s homepage that was rolled out on Oct. 23, which includes automatically generated “suggestions” of people to “reconnect” with. Within days of the launch, Twitter users and bloggers from across the Web complained that some of these suggestions were for friends who had died. “Would that I could,” complained a user on Twitter before ending her tweet with the hash tag #MassiveFacebookFail…”
Oof.
I’ve been pretty lucky in my life, so far. I’ve only had one contemporary die — a high school classmate, who succumbed to cancer six days after high school graduation. But seeing as how irritated I get when facebook tries to tell me stuff about people I just plain don’t care about, I can’t imagine the sadness of facebook trying to reconnect me with people who have died.
As facebook has gotten more popular, I’ve been forced to make some hard decisions about adding and whatnot. Requests from family members that I not only don’t respect, but who actually make my skin crawl; acquaintances who are disgusting and the dreaded exes all pose their unique issues. Thanks to the genius of Joe, I’ve managed to solve these issues without having to confront people or straight up deny their requests. (Facebook has some awesome blocking options that lets you accept a friend request, but then drop them down a blackhole from which you never see or hear anything from or about them again. I also think it prevents them from seeing anything about you or sending you messages. Genius.) However, in that vein, facebook needs to stop forcing connections or reconnections. At this point, everybody knows how the site works. If we wanted to be writing to so and so, we would. If we we wanted to add so and so as a friend, the search box is right there at the top and we all know how to use it.
Anything more intrusive is annoying and sometimes downright hurtful.