Another Reason to Hate Facebook

Below is a little experiment I did on Facebook.  After my status update I have placed my comments after in numbered order. I have left out the comments of my friends.

Day One

I’ve thought about doing this before; I’ve thought about liking everything within sight just to see if perhaps Facebook sets limits on how many things you can like. This Wired article is pretty stupid and talks about what liking does to your news feed. I don’t know what a news feed is and hope to die with that gap in my knowledge (I know what it is now). I just think the whole concept of a like button is completely absurd. And now I will take a walk on the wild side of liking the living shit out of everything on the internet. Won’t you join me?

my comments:
1- Yikes, liking shit can be exhausting. Luckily Facebook is cooperating because they just line stuff up in “Recommended Pages” and I just mow them down like in a zombie apocalypse.

2 - It's like a video game but I think I just liked Hitler.

3 - I got a warning saying "It looks like you are using this feature in a way it wasn't meant to be used. Please slow down or you could be blocked from using it" (picture above). Gutless punks! This never happened to the wimp who wrote the Wired article.

4 - It's all for the sake of scientific inquiry. For some reason the “Recommended Pages” has offered a slew of young, beautiful women from India. Mail order brides? If so I hope that they get into a huge Bollywood catfight over me with singing and dancing.

Day Two

I’m on day two of what I'm calling “Operation Like My Brains Out” in which I like everything in my path. One thing that everyone needs to remember is just how much of internet culture is driven by the triviality of “hits” and “likes” which are completely passive acts that don’t cost people anything and simply represent someone pressing their finger on a mouse. “Hear ye, Hear ye. All honor the mighty mouse click!” I liked hundreds of things yesterday at a rate of probably 40-50 per minute. This is somehow registered somewhere as having some sort of meaning or value.

I must admit that I just don’t have much stomach for it today, may the spirit of scientific inquiry be damned. It's too much of a good thing that wasn't even good to begin with. Instead of Like I will imagine that the button says Lick in an effort to fortify my will.

my comments:
1 - This morning I liked a whole bunch of jazz artists whom I actually like. I’ve been listening to McCoy Tyner lately and after liking his page I was asked if I wanted to visit similar pages. Why the fuck not? It beats 300 Indian women who I don’t know from Eve that I liked yesterday.

Today I stuck mostly with stuff that I actually do like. Even with that in mind it’s easy to be totally indiscriminate in my use of the like button.

2 - In the “Recommended Pages” part of FB it says if someone on my Friends list has liked a particular page. From now on everything you look at will have my name there. I like everything!

3 - I just find the whole idea of the like button to be completely absurd. I made myself laugh because as I was indiscriminately mowing down things with the like button I stopped dead in my tracks when the Recommended Pages offered up the movie Rain Man. I hate that movie and wouldn’t hit the like button even on my like rampage. Sorry Sara, I don't think that I can like your comment because I have already been warned that I’ve used up my likes, at least for today. I'll try one more.

4 - File under, "I rest my case."
      I have a theory that any film that has more than one explosion in the trailer is a piece of shit. The trailer for The Expendables 3 (The Excrementables 3?) has more explosions than I could count yet the YouTube video has 8,301,007 hits with 25,226 likes.

5- P.S. I’ll be incommunicado for the next few days. I’m going to camp out for tickets to this new Sylvester Stallone movie (Excrementables 3) and I don’t have internet on my phone. 

In conclusion, the Wired article was written by a geek about geek concerns (what’s in his news feed, FB algorithms, etc.). I couldn't give a shit about that or other geek concerns. To me the Like button is nothing more than an emoticon, a shortcut to real writing. Instead of hitting the like button why not add an actual comment to a friend’s post? Hell, even if you only write the word “like” in the comments section it means more than a mouse click. I have never, would never, and will never use an emoticon so why would I bother hitting the like button?