The crappy forums don't have to let anyone register without a vouching process if they don't want to. They also don't accidentally end up on the Reddit Front Page and get swarmed by a mob of overly-enthusiastic or angry strangers who don't know or follow the community's etiquette.
That doesn't come across as any less creepy to the average user: "They stole my friend's likeness to sell me a lawn chair" still feels slimy.
I'm sure the real reason is that Facebook added a poorly thought out feature to their marketing tools around that time, and someone just decided to try it out.
Many years ago (back when Facebook still had sidebar ads), my sister was presented with a dating ad for "Hot Christian Singles" accompanied by a photo of our brother.
It was hilarious, but also mind-boggling. In what scenario would pulling in a friend's profile photo create a useful ad?
In fact, I'd go so far as to say that we should've created a similarly-consistent standard for forums. If we had solved the problem of users wanting central access to multiple forums without putting them under a single provider, we could've entirely avoided the existence of Reddit.
As much as I roll my eyes at "If your {thing} doesn't have {thing}"-style gatekeeping, this does fit well with the fact that a reversion to the old blogs+RSS setup would solve a lot of the current criticisms of the social media world. RSS decouples the reader from the author AND the platform, allowing a "News Feed" that isn't tied to a single publisher or the whims of its algorithm design.
On my work computer, my theme preference follows my mood:
When I'm feeling happy and engaged, dark mode is great. But when I'm feeling down (often in the dark days of January or February), I get a decent lift out of switching back to light mode and adding as much color to the app themes as I can.
I had a Lumia with 512MB of RAM. The OS ran great, but the web outpaced it. I couldn't open a lot of JS-heavy sites without Internet Explorer crashing.
> What happened next was predictable in hindsight. Employees began inflating their scores through tokenmaxxing: running meaningless tasks through AI agents to consume tokens and climb the rankings.
The current state of things is entirely the fault of the advertising industry. They've acted like users' banner blindness is an obstacle to be defeated, rather than a constraint to build around. Faced with something the users cannot change, they continue to pile up increasingly hostile techniques that only work for a short while before users start to automatically ignore them.
I'm curious where the one-sided arms race ends. Probably a return to subscriptions that frustrate users but are at least sustainably funded.