Rant o' the day

It's a beautiful Spring morning here in Cathedral City, one of the last calm, cool mornings before the summer heat sets in.  A great morning to sit outside with coffee and thoughts.

I (and by default, everyone of us) need a break from the unrelenting dire news bombarding us at every front.  COVID (still!), Ukraine, Roe v Wade, rampant stupidity, accepted institutional lying and obfustication, and on and on and on.  Pretty much anything is trying to set me off these days in our little bubble.

One of those things is the continued posting of Wordle scores on Facebook.  It's not only Wordle, but now it seems to be all the various offshoots of that game that appeal to the Mensa-brained people I know.  10 years ago, it wasn't uncommon for people to accidentally send an invite on Facebook for some game that they were playing:  Mafia Wars, Farmville, and the like.  I even occasionally posted something about Criminal Case after I started playing that one in 2014.  Anyone who sent those invites was generally blasted in a response to stop doing that.  I figured out quickly how to NOT post anything from Criminal Case, since I certainly didn't want to annoy people with that kind of thing.  I know I sure didn't want to get game invites.

But Wordle?  For some reason, players think it is the best thing in the world to post their daily scores.  Other than them, who the fuck cares about that?  Starting in January, after it became clear this was going to be a Thing, I started putting people that posted scores on 30 days snooze.  Throughout the first month, I put over 60 people on snooze.  Some of those people have interesting things to say other than their score, but poof, off they go.  The silence was very nice.  I found a program for my desktop that hid anything Wordle (or Sponsored, etc) called Social Fixer.  Not so for my phone, though.  I use my desktop about 10% of the time these days, so had to continue re-snoozing people that amazingly still posted scores.  I am now on my fourth round of putting people on 30 day snooze if they post a score that shows on my phone feed.  The number has decreased by a lot.  I assume a bunch of people are no longer playing; some people may be playing but don't post scores anymore.  Kudos to them.

There was a week or so there that I no longer had the option to put people on snooze, so I started seeing more and more scores, until that option came back again.  For some reason, one friend of mine is still posting a score every morning, but the option to snooze isn't available, and that's just him. It's a head scratcher.

Of course, there is a lot of other stuff that I don't want to see on Facebook, but this one thing has become a YKGOML mission to me.  As for myself, I do post a lot of stuff, especially photo albums of hikes and trips and other events, but that is for me.  I imagine during my 2 year jigsaw puzzle hobby, I got unfollowed or snoozed by a bunch of people.  There are some people that never see my posts at all, because an algorithm DOES really exist the keeps you from seeing posts from people you don't interact with.  With 1400 people on my list, about 1/3 are daily posters, and I know I never see a lot of what some people post.

So, if you are playing Wordle and its offshoots, and I haven't responded to any posts from you in four months, now you know why.