Why “Friends Day” Makes Me Hate Facebook A Little More

It’s not necessarily a bad idea to generate a cute video of fun photos and conversations Mark. But sometimes, when you guys do this kind of thing, you end up showing me photos of my father who died a couple of years ago. My Dad was very special to me, like most Dads are to most people. Losing a parent is harder than most people realize until it happens to them, and afterward you become sensitive to loss, to regret, to pain, to loneliness. It changes you. No-one can understand this until it happens to them, but it happens to most of us eventually.

And when it does the very last thing you want in the world is to have a poxy algorithm drag that up for awwws. This time my “Friends Day” video didn’t do that but at other times similar procedurally generated videos have, and in future times they will again. And every time the possibility that they might makes me hate your social network just a little bit more. I doubt you actively mean to elicit this response, but you do. You’re basically playing on my grief. Please stop. Mark the Internet tells me that your parents are still alive, and so maybe this sort of concern seems vaguely intellectual to you.

But one day you’ll understand.