The past week or two, I’ve been noticing on Facebook that friends of mine have been joining a group called “I don’t care about your farm, or your fish, or your park, or your mafia”. I don’t generally join such “advocacy” groups, as for the most part the people who the complaints are directed to simply don’t care. In the case of this group, I actually agree with the sentiment of the group, as I for one am tired of seeing all of these posts on my wall from people using apps I will never use. (Really, I’ve seen Facebook games. They’d bore the hell out of me.)
Well, yesterday, a friend of mine posted on her Twitter that she planned on doing double posting of her games to her wall simply to annoy those people who had joined that group. Her point was that instead of complaining, they should just use the built-in functionality in Facebook to hide the apps. Normally I would agree, but there are two problems I have that prevent it from being a long term solution.
The first problem is the sheer number of apps. It seems to me that every time I hit “Hide” on an app, two more pop up in peoples’ wall posts to take their place. It almost seems like every day I’m having to hit “Hide” on one app or another to get rid of these annoying posts. I’d love to be able to just click a box or set a setting to hide them all en masse… and that’s the second problem. To my knowledge (and I’ve asked others to no avail), there is no way to just hide all application wall posts. In short, I’m fighting a losing battle: I can constantly manually hide apps, but new apps keep springing up every day and I have no way to just blanket hide them.
I suppose the easiest thing to do would be to stop using Facebook, but considering how many people I know plan events and get-togethers using it these days, it would make life much more inconvenient in that respect. Unlike before, I actually DO have a social life now. I don’t begrudge people actually using the apps; I (and others) just would like a way to not see them, and Facebook doesn’t offer an easy or convenient option to shut them up. I don’t foresee it changing anytime soon, as I’m willing to bet the money made off the apps overrules any number of complaints. Until/unless something is done, though, those who use the apps should understand that while it might be easier to click “Hide” than complain in the short term, in the long term all we have to look forward is constantly clicking “Hide” or bearing with the annoyance of this filler crap polluting our walls.
You have to look at the flip side — many of these apps have rewards or activities that a player can only accomplish by responding to another person’s wall post. As long as the games have these built in “annoyances”, people will continue to post silly little updates about flowers, fish, mob hits, etc.
BTW, despite my promise to post double my normal amount I still haven’t posted nearly half of what I could. I play the damn games and I asmit that I get annoyed with them at times ;-)
I can understand that. On the other hand, there really should be an option for people to just switch off all notifications from all apps. I don’t plan on joining any games to get any “rewards”, and I’d rather not have it cluttering my wall. I’m sure others feel the same way.
Well, there’s always the option of consideration. I’ve noticed from the few apps I have used on there, that they tend to have a “Mark people you want to bother” option. I can’t really stomach facebook long enough to know how universal it is though. Courtesy could go a long way though.
-Shoe