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Facebook has more than 83 million 'fake' users

bbc.com

31–40 of 96 posts

Re: Facebook has more than 83 million 'fake' users

#33
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My massive decline in use is directly correlated to how annoying they've made it to use. Eg: You can't have your feed always sort by "Most Recent", it keeps defaulting to "Top Stories", keeping old/stagnant stories at the top of my feed just because they got a few comments, while not showing me the new stuff. Also, the sheer amount of crap they shove in your face now. " Likes TOYOTA!" then a big post by Toyota shoved…

-You can set them to "Important Updates Only" but then you miss lots of posts you might find interesting. I want to ignore their Likes of memes/pictures but still get their posts of their own content, etc. There is actually a setting for this - You need to "Unsubscribe from comments and likes by ___" I worked vigilantly at this over a few weeks and eventually my feed went back to what it used to look like circa 2008.…

Having to spend weeks vigilantly managing how it displays data to you sound like a nightmare.

Re: Facebook has more than 83 million 'fake' users

#35
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

-You can set them to "Important Updates Only" but then you miss lots of posts you might find interesting. I want to ignore their Likes of memes/pictures but still get their posts of their own content, etc. There is actually a setting for this - You need to "Unsubscribe from comments and likes by ___" I worked vigilantly at this over a few weeks and eventually my feed went back to what it used to look like circa 2008.…

Having to spend weeks vigilantly managing how it displays data to you sound like a nightmare.

It was pretty annoying, not gonna lie, but weeks may have been a bit of a stretch - I have about 450 friends and I'd say after a couple days of 'vigilance' I was 90% of the way there, but there were stragglers that showed up for a while after that. It wasn't until everything reverted and started showing up again that it truly felt like a nightmare.

Re: Facebook has more than 83 million 'fake' users

#36
post #4

Worth noting that not all these "fakes" are bad, or even inactive or less active. For example, most performers on the Burlesque scene have accounts specifically for their Burlesque personas, with names like "Kitty Cupcake" or "Tabitha Taboo" and the like. These are obviously not their real names, but a consequence of the fact that Burlesque performers don't want the offline attention on their personal or professional…

> "These are very legitimate use of a social networking platform." I have many friends (not strippers, unfortunately) who are active on the site with completely fraudulent personal information. The problem isn't that the accounts are inactive. The problem is that businesses are buying ad-space based on the data produced by these "fake" accounts. When my 30 year-old female friends from Canada are generating data as 65…

I have a fake account I set up. During my internship after college, our HR recruiter sent us an email with a link to like their internship facebook page. The email wasn't a request.

So I made a fake account to like their page. If HR got a hold of my real account and Facebook turned off my privacy settings, I might not have been hired.

Re: Facebook has more than 83 million 'fake' users

#37

I am in a complicated relationship on FB with my fish. Who has a lot more fish and human friends than me (~800 against 99). Never understood how he gets new friend requests everyday.

I did an experiment a few years ago where I set up a profile for someone who supposedly went to my university. His pictures were pulled from the profile of a male model, the rest was all made up. I went through every profile I could get and sent friend requests. I actually hit the 5000 friends limit. Usually I would send a message saying "hey we met at X party last night!" if I could find that information on their public profile. Many of the people "remembered" that. The account still gets people wishing him happy birthday.

Re: Facebook has more than 83 million 'fake' users

#38
post #2

I'd have guessed it would've been at least twice that many. I recently opened up an account for the sole purpose of being able to get into their API docs and haven't been back since. Am I a fake user?

Same here. I needed to work with their API, so I made a fake account to make some test and to access the documentation.

I have no intention of having my own facebook account, much less to have it full of debuging messages. If I created a real account, it would only annoy my real friend with messages such as "Test 1" and "sadsadasd".

Re: Facebook has more than 83 million 'fake' users

#39
post #6

Been using Facebook every day since 2007. Recently though I've noticed my visits to the site drop to maybe once or twice per day, whereas at its peak I was checking it multiple times per hour. I think in their desire to work out what exactly makes them money, they've changed the way you're supposed to use the site. Where I used to see a news feed full of (mostly mundane but still interesting) status updates and photo…

I've had a similar experience and similar thoughts. I'm a strong believer in free markets, etc, but sometimes I don't understand the unending need for growth (i.e. why is it considered a bad thing that Facebook is so large that it doesn't have much room for growth?) If you're large and profitable, what's wrong with that? It often seems like the relentless pursuit for growth leads to short-term decisions to increase profits that have long-term consequences of reduced customer satisfaction and thus lost profits.

Re: Facebook has more than 83 million 'fake' users

#40
post #6

Been using Facebook every day since 2007. Recently though I've noticed my visits to the site drop to maybe once or twice per day, whereas at its peak I was checking it multiple times per hour. I think in their desire to work out what exactly makes them money, they've changed the way you're supposed to use the site. Where I used to see a news feed full of (mostly mundane but still interesting) status updates and photo…

I've had a similar experience and similar thoughts. I'm a strong believer in free markets, etc, but sometimes I don't understand the unending need for growth (i.e. why is it considered a bad thing that Facebook is so large that it doesn't have much room for growth?) If you're large and profitable, what's wrong with that? It often seems like the relentless pursuit for growth leads to short-term decisions to increase p…

You're questioning the fundamental philosophy ow Wall Street (I almost wrote capitalism instead but I don't know if that's true). Solvency is not enough to drive stock prices because the price of a stock is a bet on the future value of the company, not the present value. I don't like it either...

Edit:fixing phone-induced typos.

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