Do you remember… FarmVille requests?

In 2010, logging into Facebook meant wading through a field of other people’s farms. Your aunt needed nails for her barn. A school friend had found a stray animal and wanted to know if you’d give it a home. Someone you’d met once at a party had sent you a gift. All of it from FarmVille.

Zynga launched the game on Facebook on 19 June 2009, and it spread like nothing before it. You planted crops, came back hours later to harvest them, and lost the lot if you forgot. To grow faster, you needed neighbours, so you asked everyone you knew. Over and over.

That was the genius and the problem. The game grew by filling your feed with requests, and your feed grew very tired of it. Plenty of people blocked FarmVille without ever planting a single strawberry.

The original game shut on 31 December 2020, the day Adobe stopped supporting Flash. The requests, mercifully, went with it.