We’re talking text, right? SMS? Not Facebook Messenger or Email or Instagram or something like that?
Cuz if your friends are randomly sending you links via text with no conversation that’s pretty weird, I agree.
Generally, it gets on my nerves. If, from time to time, someone sends me something connected with especially our common interests or things we’ve spoken about, that’s fine. Rarely I’ll send that to a friend, too. But some of my friends are in the habit of regularly forwarding links to stuff that interests THEM on our WhatsApp chat, via e-mail, etc. Things like bands they like, food or drink they’ve recently had, random shocking news from the whole world, politically-minded (often conspiracy theory-related) articles. To me, this is unsolicited spam. It doesn’t matter that it comes from a friend, even a good one. I don’t need it, I have my own outlets and content that I seek, I don’t have time to look at this stuff.
Many years ago, when those things were more common, some of my acquaintances put my address on mailing lists (I’m sure many of us have experienced this). At those times, I would get, with some regularity, various sensationalist and tabloid-style stories that I had never asked for and that just wasted my time. Sometimes, people would even send slide shows containing cheap artwork or photos / photoshops that was apparently meant to make a point, or at least to allude to the creator’s / sender’s tastes. Some of these gave me a few minutes of light entertainment, but were mostly just a waste of time. I remember a particularly bizarre example (I should still have it archived for reference purposes but I don’t wish to look at it again) where a friend of a friend who used to send these chain e-mails / mailing list mailouts forwarded a slide show entitled something like “Circle of Wisdom”. This was a big collection of kitsch art with no real point, other than that many of the images contained strange paintings of small children, ranging from cheap surrealism (something like a boy and a girl on a landscape and partly disembodied where a sea or other geological / hydrological formation intersects them), to downright creepy (a painting of a toddler girl with heavy 1980s-style makeup on her face and prominent jewelry). What this acquaintance meant to achieve by sharing this is completely beside me, but it strikes one as unsettling.
I would surmise that it’s acceptable to send your friend a link to something connected to a conversation topic or a mutual interest from time to time, but constantly sending someone things interesting to you without knowing with a high degree of certainty that the other person would be interested in this content as well is annoying, if not irritating - a misguided initiative and, speaking for myself, a waste of time and overload of information for the receiver.
Does that change things? I would say it’s mainly via either Facebook Messenger or Instagram Messenger.
If you’re getting random links from contacts on FB Messenger, it is almost certainly because your friend’s account has been hijacked.
It’s also highly probable on Instagram but I’m not sure. I don’t use IG much and I have actually gotten a couple random videos from friends, from their real non-hijacked profiles, which I find to be weird behavior. I’m not sure if it was accident, intended, or something else.
No, that’s not it. I’m not saying that never happens, but that’s not what I’m referring to. I’m referring to stuff that other people find humorous and share. (Well, not always humor, maybe political or something.)
Yeah. It’s a bit like the “bare links” folks post to the SDMB without saying what it is. So annoying. Especially when it’s video.