I once denied someone’s request to add me as a friend on Facebook and got an earful about how they bought one of my books and couldn’t believe I would be so rude, etc. Since then I’ve been an open networker on most of the social networks. It’s kinda’ weird sometimes to listen to people talk about how they keep track of their friends through feeds when I have too many to keep track of, but the tools continue to become more sophisticated and I’m getting closer to be able to do so.
Having said that, there is a new thing I’ve been noticing recently. Someone adds you as a friend and then tags you in a photo that you’re not in. Perhaps its a photo where they’ve added your profile picture or your name for a character from a comic book or video game. There’s really no reason for them to do this. You click on their profile and they have thousands of friends and have posted hundreds of these things, perhaps too many to do by hand. Wondering why they’re doing it I browse around their profile, looking for links or something to explain why – but nothing…
Most spam that we get is for someone to make a buck off a product. Maybe they’re selling Viagra, maybe it’s someone trying to get you to wire them money so they can send you that $10,000,000 check that only you can cash or maybe it’s for some seedy website. Either way they want you to do something that results in payment being made to them through some fashion. This is different. It’s people just posting weird collages of other people’s profile pictures and then tagging 16 to 20 people. But there’s no apparent financial gain. It’s confusing to me… Why do it?
The only fix I can think of is to de-friend them and/or just untag the photos. But now I feel the need to track them and try and figure out what the point is, or whether there is a point…
