If you have a Facebook account, no doubt you’ve seen the type of posts like “One gotta go”, “You can live here but you have to give up _________ for a year”, or some sort of misleading picture math problem. These posts get shared over and over or get thousands and thousands of replies. Why do people create these to begin with? No one actually cares if waffles are your least favorite breakfast food and no one cares if you can do arithmetic.
I’m sure that the answer has to do with money, some nefarious purpose, or both but I can’t see how getting someone to share the posts is a money making proposition for the creator.
Data mining. The more they know about you the more they can sell you something or the information to someone else. Maybe guess your security question someday when you forget you told the world you disliked waffles.
Sometimes a post is just a post. It’s interesting to see that some of your friends would give up sushi while others will give up beer. There’s been order of operations math ‘gotcha’ questions since before Zuckerberg was born.
They are often for making a FB account look active and busy, so they can sell it to someone for various purposes. Accounts get renamed after being sold, and look busy and active, making people trust them more.
Why people share them is probably along the lines of the old “Ginger vs Mary Ann” type conversations we’ve all had. It can be fun with friends but I agree the zillions on FB are annoying.
I’m not sure if it still happens, but it used to be the case that creating a lot of engagement with such posts made the account posting them valuable for resale so a business (or a spammer) could take it over and put their own posts under the noses of lots of people who had engaged with previous stuff.
None of my friends would give up beer. And I agree that it’s most likely for data mining. I think FB probably mines all of the posts out there. I post about my cats - I start seeing cat-related ads. I post about the rain - I get an ad for umbrellas.
One of the cleverer versions I’ve seen-- and I mean that in the sense of effectively propagating itself, not actually being interesting-- is the one that shows some luxury resort with the caption “you can live here free for a year but you have to live with your 2nd @; would you do it?” Everyone who shares it not only tags someone, but tags someone they tag frequently, dragging them into it in a much more active and engaging way than simply posting. It’s like the Delta variant of these stupid memes.