Humans sucks. We somehow always find a way to spoil good things. Dogs are totally so much better. In general, their morale standards are certainly higher and definitely less corruptible. It doesn’t really makes any sense to me why “dog” mostly has a negative slang’s connotation, because it is actually quite flattering.

But with all due respect to dogs, they aren’t the topic here. What I want to talk about is how the human behavior has once again managed to tarnish some great technological invention and forced a company to squander its resources trying to launder the stains.

One of the main causes for Facebook’s success is its Like annotation. It became the purest form online for a positive gesture- If a person liked some web element (photo, video, page, etc.) he/she expressed their appreciation by Liking it. A simple and powerful way to quantify the quality of elements over the internet.

But what have we (the nefarious humans) done with it? We commercialized it, transformed it into a trade. Buying and selling Facebook Likes became a too common phenomenon which ruins the true social relation transparency for people and crookedly skewing Facebook’s social graph.

Instead of a pure online gesticulation, the Like has somewhat emerged into a commodity. And Facebook, as a social networking platform which aims to reflect the most accurate social expression, can’t let that happened or at least keep it inside tolerable boundaries.

So before this Like commerce occurrence would really get out of bearable control, Facebook had to take some preventive algorithmic measures. Measures which obviously required resources that could have been allocated elsewhere to genuinely outdo the platform itself rather than dealing with the dark side of the human nature.

Facebook states that the new policing algorithms will enforce Facebook’s anti-fake Likes agenda better and averagely less than one percent of law-abiding Pages’ Likes had been amputated. That said, I’m pretty sure that for some Pages which have chosen a bit more devious promotion tactics, the amputation rate is closer to 100%…

As I implied earlier, Facebook isn’t the first internet company which have to skirmish with this kind of massive-scale forgery. It goes way, way back (in relative technological time frame)…

Not so long after the two brilliant Stanford students invented a new revolutionary system to rank web pages based on links, we (again, the vicious humans) already transformed it into a corrupt monger and today that system is vastly broken. Yeah, we screwed that one pretty good.

So this not-so-small-anymore company had to declare war against the link barter which caused a pretty monumental shitstorm. Hopefully, Facebook can avoid this sort of future tempest by severing the infected humanly contamination while it is still in its adolescence.

And maybe, just maybe, someday in the far distant future we will learn a thing or two from dogs.