Within the world of Facebook, a person has the ability to “become a fan” (now “like”) of various pages containing certain likable themes, for example: procrastination.

These pages tend to attract vast amounts of people, perhaps even becoming so popular that significant portions of Facebook are fans. At the time of writing, the page I linked has 78,286, no: 78,288 people that like it, including myself (sadly ). No forced coercion what so ever.

What I find highly flapping irritating is pages that force you to “become a fan” of or “like” a page before showing you what you allegedly want to “become a fan” of and/or “like”. Some even have the gall to require you to suggest said page to x amount of friends and/or direct you to an off-site page and bombard you with advertising or questionnaires, sometimes before allowing you to view what you wanted to “become a fan” of, or “like”.

…

Not so likable now, is it?… Do you really want to become a fan when you’re forced to undertake all of this mindless drivel just to see some simple image or body of text first? In an effort to remain objective, I can see both sides of such behaviour. Yes, it’s an attempt to become as popular (or even more so) as the page linked, however, it’s an extremely poor attempt to do so. So much so, it’s counter-productive. Time could be spent on making the page of a decent quality in the first place.

The advertising thing is worrisome, though. Quite possibly it could become an attack vector for unsuspecting computer users, by being ‘required’ to install something or to exploit holes in a web browser. The possibilities of this are endless.

Anyway. If anyone from Facebook who administers the site actually reads this, please…

Make this damn practice verboten!!