As a social & artistic experiment, I’ve been running for the past couple weeks a script called [loveMachine] on my Facebook profile. To say it quickly without blinking, the script takes over my account and likes everything that is showing up on my timeline, be it friends posts, pictures, spotify playlists or even friends of friends comments.
I won’t go into details now about why I’ve created such a project. But since I’m receiving some “hate” messages, I thought I might give some tips about the possibilities offered by Facebook:
You can unfriend people. Yes, sadly, it’s true. In the happy-happy world of Facebook, you can remove people from your friend list. Which means they won’t receive your posts anymore and you won’t receive theirs. Although you still might see their comments and likes on a mutual friend (or fan page) post. As a result of this, sending them a private message might also end up in their “spam” box. This will also decrease your friend count by one. Note that if your posts are displayed as “public”, anybody, even people outside of your friend list, can access them and like them.
You can block people. Want to erase someone from your Facebook world? Yes, it’s possible. As a result, that person will no longer exist for you and you will no longer exist for him or her. There won’t be any way for any contact between the two. Although, past comments and actions done by you might still appear on the banned profile. Total possible Facebook relations are decreased by one.
You can categorize your friends. Don’t we all already? By creating a special category for those “running the [loveMachine]” and alikes, you can then prevent all those inside that category to access anything you post. This way, you keep them as friends, can still access their posts, but in return, they can not access and act on yours. This feature has proved to solve the binary dilemma of friending or unfriending someone. Friend count is unchanged.
You can delete your account. Well, this quite obvious. Although, “delete” might not be the appropriate word, this is how Facebook has named the feature of removing access to your account. But, so far, the [loveMachine] hasn’t provoked such a definitive reaction.
As a conclusion and as good as a Facebook friend as I can be, because of this two-way relation defined by Facebook, the more you post, the more chances the [loveMachine] will reward you with a wave of likes.
There is not much more ways than the ones described above to prevent someone from (compulsively) liking. If you come across any other way, I would be glad if you share it with me here.
It’s all about spreading the love.