The Problem with the Internet is You: How to Fix It

There are a myriad of problems people have with what others post on Facebook from the duck faces to the problems no one seems to care about, but I noticed a prevailing problem that has persisted since the Internet's early inception. In the late 1990s, chain letters were a fairly huge problem. Jokes forwarded so many times that the > in front of every line extended the actual message off the screen. There were plenty of hoaxes, false or simply no longer true. And finally pictures passed on that would clog your inbox and use up bandwidth having to download the same email from five different people who have all spread it like a swarm.

Today, instead of chain letters, there's now chain images. The Internet Meme has created an easy way for people to create their own caption on an image. Other images simply have messages that just about anyone could agree, or at least agree if you are of a certain ideological leaning. The text accompanying the image are something like "Type 'Yes' if you agree" only the Facebook groups who post the image do not really care about you agreeing with the image at all. What they really want is likes and shares of their images to give more exposure to the group. People who like the pages creates even more traffic for them.

But why would a group want to post images they know you agree with if only for traffic? For the reason that most often comes up: Money. Much like people can make a fortune off website domains they know will be used in the future by selling it off, these Facebook groups gather as much traffic, shares, and likes as they can before they sell the group off. It is also not uncommon for groups who have a business to use images that have nothing to do with their business to get Likes on their page.

So how do you combat this? Simply break the chain. If you really do like an image, save it to your computer, and upload it. Anyone who likes the image after you will not originate back to the Facebook group using you to make money.

Speaking of where content originates, there is another plague on the internet, and that is websites like Upworthy, and Buzzfeed who scour the Internet, and mostly YouTube for content. They put it on their website, maybe give a link back to the original source, but for the most part, they are getting all of the traffic for someone else's content. Oftentimes they only give a short paragraph summary of the video to make it look like it's not just someone else's content on an otherwise blank website. It is not hard to share a YouTube link on Facebook, but people continually give more traffic to this cancer. The same solution can be used for this problem, as all you need to do is go to the original source, and share that.

Don't be a pawn in people's schemes, and don't waste your friends' time by filling up their feed with junk. If you want to know more information on these topics, see Buckley's take on Internet Memes and Viral Marketing, and Maddox on why BuzzFeed sucks.