Why learning which of your Facebook friends hate you is a great idea

There's a new site called "Hate With Friends" that allows you to find out which of your Facebook pals secretly resent you.

Using it is a piece of cake. After linking your Facebook account, your friends' faces appear on the screen. You then click a big, red button under the ones you hate. You'll be alerted if any of those friends does the same for you, and given an option to de-friend the haters or send them what I'm guessing is an ironic Facebook gift.

If the concept sounds familiar, it should. Even the name is a play on "Bang With Friends" (now called "Down"), a popular hook-up app that users seem to love. You simply flag which Facebook friends you would like to have sex with, and if there are any matches, you're alerted. There's no embarrassment and very little risk involved since you both opted in. (One enthused review on Google Play reads: "Best hook-up app ever!! It's jus so easy to get laid now!")

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

While Down (With Friends) is a fun yet crazy efficient way to cozy up with a formerly platonic pal, Hate With Friends is more of a passive-aggressive novelty, at least according to the guy behind it. Whether the people using it actually hate each other is almost beside the point.

"It's meant to be some fun and social commentary on the current status of Facebook," Chris Baker, the creator of the site, tells ABC News. Baker is also responsible for the whimsical but similarly useful Unbaby.me (now "Rather"), which filters out unwanted content like baby photos from your feed.

People may have some desire to find out who actually despises them (don't we all know, anyway?), but that's not what's important here. In theory, the [blank] With Friends double-blind model could be applied to any number of things, and could prove to be a really useful way to link people under common interests.

Facebook likes to imagine that it can connect people via the things they publicly "Like." And while that's may be true for a phenomenon with broad appeal like Breaking Bad, it's a cruddy way to find out which of your friends enjoy something they're less willing to openly announce to the world, like their secret desire to attend BronyCon or go on recumbent bike rides.

The main problem for any future service using such a model will be amassing enough people to generate meaningful results. But if lazy Facebookers can get laid with little more than a click and a flattering profile photo, anything's possible, really.