It's like flashy banner ads from the 90s back again that people jumped to for grabbing attention. At that time it was ads, now it's people posting their thoughts in this fashion. Since Facebook provides these backgrounds only up to a certain message character length limit, many people curate their messages just so it would fit with these flashy backgrounds.

And because these posts with the backgrounds get larger font sizes compared to normal posts, to get attention in a voluminous group one must play the same dirty game. They're literally dragging people into the dirt pit.

Hope they don't introduce animation in these gaudy backgrounds!!!

Why not just give some font controls instead and remove all this background nonsense?! (Though this could also be argued to be terrible)

One day everyone will look back at these stunts and see them for the ugliness and abomination they are, just like we look back at banner ads with derision and hate.

Wasn't the main selling point of Facebook originally that you couldn't do flashing animated geocities crap? I remember that being the reason I signed up, most of my HS friends had no business doing web design. Once they opened it up beyond ivy-league, it didn't seem to have any particular status, having a Gmail account was arguably harder (I had to get lucky getting an invite off /.).

I remember, around 2007, when facebook had started to be made more generally available outside of colleges in the US, that it seemed like a cleaner, easier, less cluttered version of MySpace. Sadly that version of the site is long since dead.

MySpace was often an assault on the senses, and disorienting. Reddit can be like that these days, perhaps worse since the interface elements also love around and can disappear. In the early days of FB, users had even less ability to customize the visual presentation of their pages than they do now. It’s about like the simplicity of HN vs a 10 highly customized subs on reddit - on one hand, users like to express their personalities. On the other, inconsistency can make for a terrible user experience.

(Sorry about the typos)

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# ppl like flashy stuff # #################

Its becoming MySpace....

I actually don't think that's necessarily fair on MySpace. With facebook it's so low effort to post or share some garish random crap to your timeline that everyone (or at least most people) are doing it all the time. With MySpace, like Geocities, at least you had to put in a bit more effort. The results weren't necessarily better but the volume of crap was simply lower due to most people being too lazy to post it.

> What's next, immersive VR full sensory presentation to convey "its weekend party yay lol :D :D:D:D:D" posts?

You joke, but they bought Oculus for a reason.

Ready Player One was a warning, not a manual!

I think the idea was to let single line shitposts compete with all the other shitposts, but they went the wrong direction. Should've made the media shitposts sized down to the text posts.

I assume big media pieces are where the advertising money is.

And video. You can tell every ad buy sells video at many times a text ad because google and Facebook are pushing them everywhere they can.

> Now they're posting videos of static text.

The English Football Association has used a 2-minute Twitter video in order to announce the list of 23 players who made it to the World Cup (https://twitter.com/England/status/996737073418784770). I personally hate this trend.

While I do understand your hate, and while I personally hate the problem of using video instead of text, I gotta say that this specific example you've mentioned can be blamed to the limitations of the platform (Twitter).

Their alternatives were:

1. Interrupt people's flow by getting them off of Twitter. 2. Try fitting them all in one tweet (impossible). 3. Try fitting them in multiple tweets, which would make the users retweet a specific tweet that contains whichever player they're interested in, and their followers wouldn't see the entire roster.

I can see the appeal of transmitting the info in a 2 minute video since it gives users one tweet they should retweet, and transfers the important message in a relatively short amount of time (albeit much longer than skimming through a block of text).

It fits easily into a 280-char tweet, with plenty of space left over for a link or explanations - the below is 160 bytes give or take:

Pickford Butland Pope

TAA Trippier Rose Maguire Jones Stones Walker Cahill

Henderson Dier Alli Lingard Young Delph RLC

Sterling Vardy Kane Rashford Welbeck

I don't see how option 1 (link to outside twitter) interrupts my flow more than a 2-minute video

> a 2-minute Twitter video

The moment you (meaning they) even combine these words you've missed the point of Twitter.