Man, I love “I Fucking Love Science”, the Facebook page with 5.4 million likes that clutters my News Feed with hundreds of clever images, many of which are stolen without attribution to their authors. It’s entertaining and amazingly sharable. It’s also changing the character of the social network — and some argue it’s doing so for the worse. We’re compliantly spamming our friends right out of our Facebook feeds.
The Daily Dot has an excellent feature examining the rise of spammy accounts on Facebook that we willingly subscribe to. Sure, these accounts give us fun, meaningless stuff to look at when our friends are being boring, but as pages like “No Hope For the Human Race” proliferate, they’re pushing our friendships to the sideline and making Facebook less social.
Curiously, Facebook is encouraging the change by offering to promote these posts to reach larger audiences. Why would Facebook wilfully undermine its social network in the name of spam? Well, the story argues it’s because Facebook ads perform notoriously badly, and the company needs to find a way to make some dollars.
So just remember that while you might fucking love science, liking the page on Facebook also means you also fucking love spam too. [Daily Dot]