Friends Day? Um, no thanks, Facebook!

On the occasion of its 12th birthday, Facebook had to do something sweet, obviously. So it dubbed this day as “Friends Day” and created short personalised videos for us all - each and every one of its 1.59 billion users.

Let me quickly remind you that Friendship Day is already a thing, which makes Friends Day so ridiculous and redundant. I ranted about that, too, the moment my buddy Mark told me about it.

Basically, I was trying to say this -

but I will never be as cool as Regina George. To put it into context, Facebook is acting like Gretchen Wieners, even though it is better than that daft little Gretchen. And this is just Facebook’s way of trying to get us to hit the ‘like’ button on it. Fine, fair enough. We all forget we’re not in high school anymore. It happens, I get it.

So anyway, at the top of my Newsfeed was a photo montage video, only short of a red ribbon wrapped around it. The video featured photos of my friends and a few pictures picked randomly as a shoutout to good times. Forty seconds in, a message went “And remember this?” followed by a photo of my Pray for Nepal profile picture (assuming that’s my face, I guess) as if that was a celebratory moment. Obviously, it’s an embarrassing mistake. This is a machine trying to give me a computer-generated virtual gift, it’s understandable. But this was not nice, because Facebook made an ass of itself, bringing to mind the 2015 Nepal earthquake in the middle of celebrating friendship and life.

I guess what I’m saying is, Facebook’s programming is smart, but not smart enough to be human. Its algorithms are such that it cleverly picks up some stuff, but at the risk of acting insensitive. It threw up memories of unpleasant times instead of being the happy-thoughts-happy-times box that it wanted to be. Which is why I’m not the only one on the Internet frowning at my screen in annoyance instead of enjoying the sweet video surprise.

Essentially, Facebook works as something in between a digital slam book (everybody has lovely things to say about each other) and a scrapbook diary (a life journal with photos to document daily moments, but especially the important events that must be acknowledged). Now, slam books and diaries don’t talk to us. They quietly sit and let us do our thing. Maybe that’s the problem? Maybe Facebook needs to refrain from interacting with us so much and focus on improving the platform instead? I’m just sharing thoughts here.

But this rant is actually a plea against these impersonal, insensitive “personalised” montage videos. They have got to stop. They’re visually unappealing and remind me of those badly designed montage tributes we used to create back in school. You know the ones. The ones we made for our high school bae ❤ or for our BFF4eva on her birthday. They tried hard, but they’re lame.

Maybe the people behind Facebook aren’t really cool peeps, though. Otherwise they wouldn’t be working hard to build this phenomenal tech company that is a household name today. They’d be sitting with their feet up, whining about something on Medium in more words than necessary.