Dear Facebook,
Hey. It’s Eat24. Look, we need to talk. This isn’t easy to say since we’ve been together so long, but we need to break up. We’d love to say “It’s not you, it’s us” but it’s totally you. Not to be rude, but you aren’t the smart, funny social network we fell in love with several years back. You’ve changed. A lot.
When we first met, you made us feel special. We’d tell you a super funny joke about Sriracha and you’d tell all our friends and then everyone would laugh together. But now? Now you want us to give you money if we want to talk to our friends. Now when we show you a photo of a taco wrapped with bacon, you’re all like “PROMOTE THIS POST! GET MORE FRIENDS!” instead of just liking us for who we are. That’s hella messed up.
Don’t mess with us when we’re hangry.
To be honest, lots of our friends warned us about you (not to name names but to definitely name names: Forbes, Fast Company, Wall Street Journal). But we ignored them and trusted you because we loved you. Now we find ourselves questioning our entire relationship.
So we Googled you (nothing too creepy, just some light research) and found out you’re doing this because of a new algorithm that decides what people want to see in their news feeds. If that’s true, that means your algorithm is saying most of our friends don’t care about sushi porn, that they aren’t interested in hearing our deepest thoughts about pizza toppings. Are you listening to yourself? Do you know how ridiculous that sounds? You know that all those people clicked ‘Like’ on our page because it’s full of provocatively posed burritos and cheese puns, right?
Are we making you horngry, baby?
(Image credit and best name ever goes to: Chica Chocolatina)
But we loved you, Facebook, so we tried to understand you and your algorithm. As far as we could tell though, it involves the words ‘affinity’ and ‘time decay.’ There also might be a Greek letter in there somewhere but we’re not sure cuz we got bored and ordered a panini. Look Facebook, all we’re saying is that we wanted to share a joke about chicken wings, not ponder astrophysics.
WAT
Truth be told, your actions make us feel like you don’t respect us. Maybe you think our food-related pick-up lines and sexy tater tots memes come out of nowhere, but we spend a lot of time trying to make people happy. Seriously, we dedicate at least an hour a day to finding a word that rhymes with Havarti because we want to write the first-ever cheese Sonnet.
All we do is give, and all you do is take. We give you text posts, delicious food photos, coupons, restaurant recommendations… and what do you do in return? You take them and you hide them from all our friends. Maybe you steal our random musings about pork buns and claim them as your own. Guess we’ll never know.
Let’s be honest, the only formula we’ve ever cared about is Pie.
Even if we could figure out your mysterious, all-knowing algorithm, it’s constantly changing, so what works today might not work tomorrow. Posting something that most of our friends see is like biting into a burrito and actually getting all seven layers…never gonna happen. The point is, you’re wasting our time and cock-blocking food porn from our friends. Not cool, Facebook, not cool.
But the bigger picture issue is that we can’t trust you. You lied to us and said you were a social network but you’re totally not a social network. At least not anymore. When we log in to Facebook, we want to see what Aunt Judy is doing next weekend (hopefully baking us cupcakes) and read hilarious headlines from The Onion and see pictures of a cat who got his head stuck in the couch cushions. Instead, we get this:
Go away. For reals.
It makes us think all you care about is money. Why should we have to wade through a dozen promoted posts about how to lose belly fat (are you trying to tell us something?) and requests for Candy Crush (NO! Just no.) and suggesting we like our arch nemesis’ page (seriously, WTF) before we can finally find the perfect Doge meme, It really seems like you’ve lost your way and have become nothing more than an ad platform.
Yeah, you’re right. We made mistakes too. We actually paid for some of those annoying promoted posts. You were all like, “Dude, you gotta try out promoted posts, It’ll help you make more friends and then more people can enjoy your LOLZ.” So we tried it because we loved you. Also, YOLO.
According to Facebook, we are cool and hip.
And it’s true, we got a ton of new likes on our page. Look at all these new friends, we thought. There’s a guy in Houston, and this guy in… Bangladesh? And this girl in… Dubai? WTF Facebook!? When we said “we want to take over the world with taquitos” it was mostly a metaphor (also it was 4:20 at the time). Well, we really do want to feed the whole world one day, but right now we’re only in the U.S., so even though we love our new international friends, we’d prefer not to piss them off by showing them a photo of a delicious calzone that they can’t even order. Why did you think we wanted friends we can’t actually feed? That makes about as much sense as getting a pepperoni pizza and only one slice has pepperoni on it.
Food analogies are the only thing that makes sense to us.
And don’t you dare play mind games and say we’re being crazy. We aren’t the only ones who feel this way. Check out this little video the fine folks at Veritasium made that puts a bit more insight into these “likes.”
Honestly, we’re kinda hurt that you’ve changed so much. We hardly recognize you with all the facelifts you had. Take a look back. You’ve changed your look more times than Madonna. Seriously. It’s not that we don’t like change, it’s just super annoying that you decide to increase banner dimensions by 5 pixels for no reason.
Real talk, if we had to choose between making 142 different size banners to conform to whatever you’re feeling that particular week, or lie on the couch and think about fried sushi rolls, we’re always going with sushi. Just saying, but maybe you could take a lesson from this amazing webpage for the Space Jam movie. The website hasn’t changed since 1996 and it’s AMAZING.
Best. Website. Ever.
What? You don’t like being compared to an older, more distinguished website? Fine. Let’s talk about your peers. Not to hit below the belt, but we have a lot more fun when we hang out with Twitter and Instagram. They don’t have weird algorithms, which means all of our besties get to see everything we post. You might have noticed that when Ellen decided to take a selfie of beautiful people being beautiful, she did it on Twitter. And she got so many RTs, she broke it. The whole site went down. When was the last time you got that much action?
#TwitterForever
So that’s it. We’re done. All you’re left with are some single-serve freezer meals. Us? We can eat a whole pizza by ourselves so we aren’t even worried about that. We’ll pack our things and be gone by 11:59pm on Monday night. Yes, you read that right. Eat24, the company that is always telling customers to Like our page, post on our wall, and ask us for coupons on Facebook… is deleting its Facebook. This is real.
Will anyone miss it? Will anyone even know it’s gone?
Confession: Darth Vader is our father.
Who knows what’ll happen between now and Monday. Maybe so many of our friends will write on our wall to say goodbye that your API will break. Ok, we don’t actually know what an API is or if it can break but something might crash or have an error or make the mouse do that pinwheel thing. So have a nice life and good luck playing Words With Friends alone.
P.S. If you are reading this and your name isn’t Facebook, and you are in fact one of our beautiful hungry customers – WE STILL LOVE YOU and we’re giving you a chance to say goodbye. Any last words? Since we’re deleting the whole thing on Monday at 11:59 PM, you can say pretty much whatever you want. Confess your love of brussel sprouts, admit that you still suck your thumb, reveal your celebrity crush. We’ll never tell. Say goodbye to Eat24’s Facebook.
P.P.S.S. If you are reading this and you’re hungry, luckily our app isn’t powered by social media or even blogs. We’d love to help you make food happen. Get the Eat24 app and summon egg rolls to your couch.
This post originally appeared on Eat24, and re-published with permission.
Featured Image: Kuvona via Shutterstock.com
