A rant about Facebook Fan pages

So I’m on Facebook one day, and in the news feed I see a fan page, “I LOL’D at “. Being used to these fan pages, I click “Become a Fan” before going to the fan page and looking at what it’s actually about.

Going to the fan page, it looks something like this, with a big arrow pointing to the right, with something like “Click X tab”:

I apologize for having to scale down the images. My blog’s width is only 450 pixels.

Fair enough, I go to the CLICK HERE tab. The page looks something like this:

Sometimes it’s even worse, requiring you to invite all your friends before proceeding.

Often it will go one step further and offer you a piece of javascript to invite all your friends (usually without you knowing what it actually does). The code they want you to copy and paste into the browser looks something like this:

javascript:elms=document.getElementById('friends').getElementsByTagName('li'); for(var fid in elms){if(typeof elms[fid] === 'object'){fs.click(elms[fid]);}}

I’m pretty sure it’s not technically possible for them to detect whether you have actually invited any of your friends.

Anyways, supposing we click the next “Click here” button:

Now they link you to some random blogspot page, or whatever hosting site. There’s some javascript popup of some survey you have to complete, before the popup supposedly disappears.

The website owner gets paid a considerable amount for a survey. $1-3 the last time I checked (much more than you could expect to gain from ads).

Of course the surveys themselves try to rip you off, usually demanding your cell phone number to give you a ‘pin code’. You don’t actually get anything, except perhaps a worthless monthly subscription and a bill. Zynga does it too.

Back to the blogspot page. Notice the text:

Depending on your screen configuration, you may or may not be able to see the text. Adjusting the contrast in Photoshop:

Scroll down. Except you can’t scroll down, because there’s some javascript that sets you back to the start of the page when you try to.

By this point, I’ve forgotten what I’m trying to do. Oh yea, there’s supposed to be a funny picture at the end of all this.

And unless you manually remove yourself from the fanpage, others will see that you’ve became a fan of something. This is a chain reaction, seeing that the page currently has 287k fans.

I don’t mind really stupid fan pages. I don’t mind pages like this if there aren’t too many of them. The problem is, there’s such a huge number of similar fan pages.

Advertising is fine, but this is beyond advertising. They are actively scamming the less informed members of Facebook. It’s incredible that this is allowed to happen, and at such an extreme rate.