Mark Zuckerberg speaks on stage
Mark Zuckerberg promises that you'll soon stop getting so many annoying game invites.
Zuckerberg hosted a Townhall Q&A at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi, and the top-voted question that people wanted an answer to was, "I seriously don't want any more invitations to Candy Crush Saga - how can I stop getting them?"
Zuckerberg said that once he noticed that that question ranked so high, he reached out to the team back in Menlo Park to see what could be done.
"There are some tools that are kind of outdated that allow people to send invitations to people who have never used a game, and have a gotten a lot of invitations in the past, but don't play games on Facebook," Zuckerberg said. "And we hadn't prioritized shutting that down, but if this is the top thing that people care about, then we'll prioritize that and we'll do it."
Right now, many games incentivize players to invite their friends to get points or extra lives. The desperation to get the bonuses can push those players to invite every single person they know. That, of course, can wear on the patience of people who will never, ever start playing the game in question.
Facebook tells Business Insider that it's running tests to see how to make the overall experience better.
"We are constantly looking to improve how people discover and engage with games via Facebook," the company said via email. "We are now testing new ways to deliver game requests to only engaged players who are most likely to find them relevant."
For example, the company has tested turning off mobile notifications for game invites.
Screenshot
The seemingly spammy invite system clearly still annoys people, but it's still not as bad as it used to be in the hay-day of games like FarmVille or Mafia Wars.
Zuckerberg said on stage that surfacing community questiosn like this is one of the reasons that his informal Q&As are so valuable.