Enough: The flood of Look Back videos on Facebook must stop

Not to interrupt your celebratory mood Facebook, but you may want to tweak your algorithms a bit.

Ever since the social media network released its Look Back personalised video tool for all users, the News Feed section on everyone’s profiles have been flooded.  

Facebook turned 10 on February 4 and celebrations included the release of it iOS-only news aggregator app Paper as well as Look Back. While Paper is receiving both rave reviews and its fair share of controversies, it is Look Back that has clearly made the most impact.

It seems that practically every News Feed on the social networking site is flooded with Look Back videos. And its way too soon for this, people. We’ve barely gotten over those Year in Review posts that infiltrated our News Feeds by the dozens just a month ago.

The Look Back tool provided every single Facebook member with a personalised video of collage photos taken from their profiles and is signed by “Mark and the Facebook team” as a thank you card for using the social network. The video contains information like when you joined Facebook, what were your most liked stories and is about a minute long. Sounds cool? Well it was, until everyone decided to hit that big shiny “share” button and flood everyone’s News Feeds

Twitter is already full of complaints about the deluge of Look Back videos.

Add to it the fact that Look Back shows you images from as far back as six and seven years ago, of awkward photos and ones with exes and you have a cringe-fest on your hands. You cannot choose which pictures show up in your video and therefore you may come across some really annoying pictures you forgot existed on your profile, during the minute long video with a slightly emotional piano score.

Here’s the buzz about Look Back on Twitter:

The annoyance with Look Back comes even as Facebook is trying to ensure its News Feed product throws up relevant stories for users. The company has regularly been tweaking the algorithm for News Feed to ensure things like more news worthy stories and less memes turn up, in order to keep users engaged and on the site.

Earlier last month Facebook had also said that it will be surfacing more status updates from friends and less from pages as well. To now go through the News Feed and find only Look Back videos with the same default caption that reads, “Here’s my Facebook movie. Find yours at https://facebook.com/lookback/ ‪#‎FacebookIs10,” is a bit disheartening.