Facebook Weirdness

Today I made a series of seemingly innocuous, though slightly filthy, joke tweets based on a vaginal rejuvenation cream being sold in India.

The Facebook thread (I have Twitter set to auto-post to Facebook) for the third tweet now has over 118,000 comments and 5,500 likes, and the comment threat is INSANE. This appears to have affected the posts of many, many people. The user who appears to be posting the majority of the comments (mostly replying with the single letter “r”) is identified as “Rahmi Özgündüz”, but that name (and the photo on the profile) belong to a Turkish soccer player. It’s possible he/she/it started this, but without more info it’s hard to say. Could just be a regular ‘ol database ID bug.

This has got to be the problem of the day for some poor Facebook engineer. Sorry, dude. Or lady.

Update: Ben Garvey has the idea that somehow a post ID has been duplicated across several different FB posts, which is making all of the comments be piled into one big thread. Sounds about right to me.

Update Two: The responses, at least the ones in a language I speak, are hilarious. They range from incredulous, to indignant to pleas for sanity to the uncaring universe.

Kickstarter’s Spam Problem

Garrett Murray on a troubling trend in Kickstarter projects:

At least once a week I receive an unsolicited request to fund a project. These messages are rarely offensive in and of themselves–they’re usually just information about the project and a paragraph or two of generic “please help us out” text–but they’re still spam. They’re usually sent to a blind carbon copy list, but occasionally someone will screw up and send it out via plain CC, exposing all the email addresses they’ve targeted.

This is spam, plain and simple. Kickstarter needs to decide if it’s the kind of company who wants to allow this (in order to potentially make more money in the short term, ala Facebook, at the expense of user satisfaction and damage to their brand) or come down hard on it (do the right thing for their users AND backers). I know what I hope they do.