Great article
‘People You May Know’ helped Facebook grow exponentially
11–20 of 155 posts
Re: ‘People You May Know’ helped Facebook grow exponentially
#12Ah, the wonderful feature the spies on my location to suggest me friends that are in my phone book, but aren't connected on Facebook in any way whenever I get to actually hang out with them.
Re: ‘People You May Know’ helped Facebook grow exponentially
#13> A sex worker found Facebook recommending her clients, who did not know her true identity. A sperm donor got a suggestion for the biological child he never met. A psychiatrist learned that Facebook was recommending that some of her patients friend each other on the service. It is amazing how little pieces of information that are likely innocuous by themselves can be combined to develop a pretty thorough understandin…
But we don't know if these are false positives. The connection between all those examples doesn't have to be the suggested link. E.g. the patients could be suggested because they have a common friend.
Yeah, the psychiatrist seems the easiest to explain since when choosing a medical professional people may ask their friends who they recommend.
Re: ‘People You May Know’ helped Facebook grow exponentially
#14They kept sending me "do you know [person I probably don't know]" as notifications on my phone! This was the last straw that made me delete the app and my account entirely a few years ago. One of the big annoyances in life is being notified or bugged about something I don't need to be notified about. This keeps getting worse with modern tech all the time which has slowly led me to stop using anything I don't have ful…
If only that applied to everyone. Most people will get ten crappy notifications with one good one and go "Oh, well, not too bad." I think I used the 'People You May Know' feature a bit when I first joined but, as time went on, it really just became "This one guy who once worked at the same place as you and maybe knows someone you know". These algorithms are very smart and that's their problem - they overestimate the number of connections an average person makes.
Re: ‘People You May Know’ helped Facebook grow exponentially
#15Paywalled so I'll just barf my opinion about my feelings on that feature. I get recommended the most random people who are friends-of-friends I've never met. There have been so many bad suggestions that I assume they're all wrong. I guess everyone else had the complete opposite experience based on the article title
I think they just err on the side of false positives. You can always ignore the friend suggestion if it's someone you don't know. If they fail to suggest someone you do know, that's a missed opportunity.
Some of this is inevitable. For example, their algorithm was eager to suggest one particular person to me, and it did so multiple times even though I did not know the guy. It was someone who had worked at the same company as I did, in the same department, but quit the company slightly before I was hired. So he and I had easily 10 Facebook friends in common. Facebook had good reasons to suspect that I knew the guy. Even though I didn't, I might have, and they have no way of knowing for sure, so they might as well just ask.
Re: ‘People You May Know’ helped Facebook grow exponentially
#16They kept sending me "do you know [person I probably don't know]" as notifications on my phone! This was the last straw that made me delete the app and my account entirely a few years ago. One of the big annoyances in life is being notified or bugged about something I don't need to be notified about. This keeps getting worse with modern tech all the time which has slowly led me to stop using anything I don't have ful…
If only that applied to everyone. Most people will get ten crappy notifications with one good one and go "Oh, well, not too bad." I think I used the 'People You May Know' feature a bit when I first joined but, as time went on, it really just became "This one guy who once worked at the same place as you and maybe knows someone you know". These algorithms are very smart and that's their problem - they overestimate the…
A normal human can sustain relation with 40 relatives, 150 friends and 1000 acquittances. FB algos are (deliberately) tuned for twice those numbers.
Re: ‘People You May Know’ helped Facebook grow exponentially
#17> A sex worker found Facebook recommending her clients, who did not know her true identity. A sperm donor got a suggestion for the biological child he never met. A psychiatrist learned that Facebook was recommending that some of her patients friend each other on the service. It is amazing how little pieces of information that are likely innocuous by themselves can be combined to develop a pretty thorough understandin…
Relatedly, Venmo has given me the identify of people I've contacted before by phone.
Re: ‘People You May Know’ helped Facebook grow exponentially
#18They kept sending me "do you know [person I probably don't know]" as notifications on my phone! This was the last straw that made me delete the app and my account entirely a few years ago. One of the big annoyances in life is being notified or bugged about something I don't need to be notified about. This keeps getting worse with modern tech all the time which has slowly led me to stop using anything I don't have ful…
If only that applied to everyone. Most people will get ten crappy notifications with one good one and go "Oh, well, not too bad." I think I used the 'People You May Know' feature a bit when I first joined but, as time went on, it really just became "This one guy who once worked at the same place as you and maybe knows someone you know". These algorithms are very smart and that's their problem - they overestimate the…
I can tell you my kids' school is now driving a program to improve what I like to call "digital skepticism" (defense against dark arts?) - these are elementary school kids
I think Facebook's tactics were a landgrab before the global populace starts to build an antibody to pervasive advertising/spam/surveillance.
Clearly this needs to be bolstered by legislation/regulation.
Re: ‘People You May Know’ helped Facebook grow exponentially
#19You got a product when your users interact with other users while you sleep.
Re: ‘People You May Know’ helped Facebook grow exponentially
#20They kept sending me "do you know [person I probably don't know]" as notifications on my phone! This was the last straw that made me delete the app and my account entirely a few years ago. One of the big annoyances in life is being notified or bugged about something I don't need to be notified about. This keeps getting worse with modern tech all the time which has slowly led me to stop using anything I don't have ful…
>This was the last straw that made me delete the app and my account entirely a few years ago.
Why not just disable notifications, or just uninstall the app without deleting your account? Facebook can still be of use to you without you being of use to it.
I've long used Facebook only for messaging and managing events because it's an effective and ubiquitous platform for both of these things.