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Comment by michaelochurch | Hacker News Reader

You forgot to mention that Zynga is one of the major reasons why Facebook is starting to decline in the U.S. People hate Farmville and Mafia Wars and the associated spam.

That said, Words With Friends is an excellent implementation of Scrabble and it's actually social, not alienating like that Farmville garbage. It's quite well-polished. I respect the attention to detail.

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You forgot to mention that Zynga/FarmVille was also one of the reasons Facebook picked up (and kept) so many users so fast.

It's digital crack manufactured by Zynga's bench of psychologists, but it brought in the users.

The original Words With Friends app was, of course, developed before Newtoy were acquired by Zynga. Fortunately, the social DNA (and polish) of the game has remained intact.

Why down vote this? While the spam from these games was turned off for non-subscribers, I heard Tim Train from Zynga say at a presentation that they are still experiencing the backlash from the legacy of spam.

Why would non-Farmville-playing users leave Facebook because they are tired of it's spam when they could just hide posts from it?

Consider the majority market of Facebook users, many don't know how to "hide posts" and will often be turned off whent their facebook wall begins to look like their hotmail account.

Don't always assume the average user has the know-how you do and don't always assume they're interested in solving the problem either.

And even if you know how it seems like every time I log into facebook (admittedly rarely) there's a handful of new spam games making the rounds. It's a little frustrating that there's no blanket option of block all of the stupid game spam, or switch from a blacklist to a whitelist. I'd much rather un-block specific games than have to block every game ever made.

Probably time to block a few of your friends.

It's still a sign of the decreasing signal-to-noise ratio. I could get a Tivo and fast-forward through commercials on TV, too, but it's not worth it.

That should be false. Games bring back millions of users to facebook. Remember that while facebook attempted to hide games some time ago, they reintroduced viral features like a scrolling side ticker to spark up the traffic. Why would they do that if they would not benefit from it?

Wow, I actually hate Words with Friends — its ugly design, its noises, its super-slimy full-screen no-close-button ads, the way some games end in stalemate that the system does not recognize, etc.

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