“Great Year” a false good idea Signed Facebook – ZDNet France

The engine of Facebook, it’s your appetite to stage the positive moments of your life. An evening with friends, the arrival on earth of the youngest, these holiday to the Seychelles where of course, it was fine. Otherwise, there is a picture filter to fix it.

Because seriously, who wants to flaunt his contacts its shortcomings, failures, his clumsiness? (If they are funny and that was a bit of self-deprecating humor can be anyway).

“I’m not on Facebook for a year,” says a former user disappointed with this machine to show happiness, “it depresses me.” As this article also highlights Slate, Facebook causes great frustration among those who can not or do not want to ‘promote’ their lives on the Internet. To see so many profiles boasting radiant lives and filled evenings / meetings / outputs, many tend to depreciate their own life experience joyful face these extracts carefully selected and posted on Facebook.

Flatter the ego users

Because Facebook is not to reflect on what life can be. He just needs to flatter the ego of its users to sell more advertising space and popularity to the brands which pay a high price to appear in the stream of life fantasy of its members.

With This necessarily positive content, Facebook has begun to offer its users by end of this year a little special format called “Super Year” (or “Year in Review in original). The idea? Indulging discovering a selection of the content published last year and then again fun showing his friends how much we were happy during this period of time.

“I had a great year! Thank you to have contributed “to mention the format chosen few who can contemplate on their wall happiness of the annual summary of each member consenting to the transaction.” Great Year “is based on an algorithm that selects the most loved and commented pictures the past year, gathers and presents the chronologically.

Example message of discontent after the distribution of the application “Super year.” Published on Facebook.

Personally, it made me realize that I already had a double chin skiing Last March, the state of my belly at the beach in July was pathetic, and my only notable activity this fall was to attend a wedding, which I would describe missed. This format has caused other negative responses in the audience of Facebook, an example of which is the francophone Facebook page dedicated to the case.

If Eric Meyer

But this bad format has also sparked outraged reaction of a member of this community. To the point that Facebook has to apologize. Eric Meyer lost her daughter this year. She was 6 years old and died from brain cancer. For this reason, it is not particularly keen to be offered a content “Great Year” at the end of 2014, he says on his blog. Eric Meyer evokes the “algorithmic cruelty” that has imposed an exhilarating glimpse of the past year, while in real life, it was very tragic.

“For those of us who have lived the death of loved ones, spent time in the hospital, divorced, have lost their jobs or have lived a hundred possible crises, we may not want to look back on the past year, “explains t -it.

After this blunder, widely reported on the web, Jonathan Gheller the project “Great Year” Facebook chief contacted Eric Meyer to apologize personally. “We can do better,” he has told the Washington Post. It should not be complicated.