Relationship Advice from a Machine
A little while after arriving at work this morning, I opened my email with the requisite amount of trepidation (I have grown to fear opening my work email every morning), and discovered that everybody really does seem to have sodded off for Easter. I therefore did what any self respecting procrastinator would do – cracked open a web browser, and jumped straight down the rabbit hole.
First destination? Tumblr. You can say what you like about Tumblr – I should know, I’ve said a lot about it in the past – but the one thing it has going for it is a colossal amount of bored people publishing a world of endlessly entertaining rubbish. Think “reddit minus the assholes”.
I spent a couple of minutes scrolling through the most recent posts using the ninja keyboard commands (what do you mean, you didn’t know about the keyboard commands?), hitting like on any candid selfies, interesting thoughts, and whatever else people post in the middle of the night. While happily clicking away, Tumblr suddenly interrupted me with a chat message. From a robot.
The “tumblrbot” had apparently noticed me hitting “like” on a post for a particular person, and suggested that I should get to know them – that we might have a “beautiful friendship”. I smiled, and of course wrote a message to the suggested person, telling them that I was doing exactly as I was told.
I grinned the entire time. A vast computer somewhere was busy playing the playground game of “tell those two people that they like each other, then sit back and see what happens”. Or maybe it was completely random. I like to think a secret team within Tumblr have wasted a huge amount of resources building the playground game into the machine though – high fives to them if they have.
I’ll let you know how the new friendship goes.