For years, the specter of Candy Crush Saga has loomed menacingly over Facebook. Just like in Communist East Germany, the game had users mistrusting their friends and neighbors — If I accept this person’s friend request, are they just going to send me a million Candy Crush invites? The suspicion and paranoia were unbearable, but now, like a paler David Hasselhoff, Mark Zuckerberg is here to tear down the wall, sing “Looking for Freedom,†and make things right once more.
At an event in India this week, Zuckerberg swore to the audience that he would put an end to the scourge of Candy Crush invites once and for all, after the incessant invitations were ranked as users’ greatest annoyance with Facebook in an online poll. “I sent a message to the person who runs the team in charge of our developer platform, and I said that by the time I do this town hall Q&A, it would be good if we had a solution to this problem,†Zuck revealed. Already, he said, the developers had determined the flaw in the system: “There are some tools — that are kind of outdated — that allow people to send invitations to people who’ve never used a game and don’t play games on Facebook.†As Facebook engineers had dealt with other problems, the Candy Crush issue was allowed to linger. No longer. “If this is the top thing that people care about,†Zuckerberg said, “we’ll prioritize that and do it. So we’re doing it.†Democracy does work — at least this once.