The "Weird Images Worth Seeing In Various Contexts" group on Facebook might be modest in numbers, but not in its content. Currently, the community is comprised of 5.8k lovers of all things strange. What's more, there's an Instagram page dedicated to similar strange pictures, titled "Weird Images Worth Seeing," with almost 7.5k followers.
The creator of the page is Hannes, who also serves as an admin for the Facebook group. In 2022, when we covered the Instagram page, Bored Panda reached out to Hannes and he kindly agreed to give us more background about how the page came to be and the biggest challenges he faces with both the page and the group.
Back then, Hannes told us that the idea for the page came to him during the COVID-19 pandemic. Feeling bored while the lockdown was happening, he saved up a lot of weird images. "I had built up such a huge collection of random weird images that I just needed to share it with the world," he explained.
After sharing the images he stacked up on his phone for a while, Hannes decided to make "Weird Images Worth Seeing" into a community effort. I thought, 'Why not make a Facebook group attached to the page?' This way, everyone can share their own 'Weird Images Worth Seeing'. And it kinda worked," Hannes recalled.
If you think a community of 5.8k members is not worth checking out, you'd be wrong. This is actually the third iteration of the group. The original one had over 100k followers at some point. They would publish several posts per hour to keep the content quality and visibility high. But that didn't last, because the new algorithm soon deemed the community to be too weird even for Facebook.
In 2022, Hannes told us how the group was hit with Facebook's strict algorithm and had to change the way it operates. "Our friend Mark Zuckerberg didn't really seem to like some of [our] posts," Hannes recalled. "The Facebook algorithm became very strict and things like a bare butt from 100 meters away eventually got us banned."
Yet the creators didn't wallow for long and created a second iteration of the group. Hannes and the moderators then tried to get into the algorithm's good graces by being more strict with what posts they approved. They soon got to 120k members, but, unfortunately, it wasn't enough, as Facebook still thought their content was too inappropriate.
The admins would get hundreds of post requests every day, but three particular ones got flagged and they were banned again. Luckily, the third iteration of the group is still going strong and has been for several years now. Back in 2022, Hannes said that he seldom can predict what images will be more popular, since the feed tends to be quite random.
