The Curious Case of the Facebook Algorithm

social-media-1233873_960_720I have been on Facebook for more than a decade and have 3000 plus friends but the last few years the News Feed Algorithm has been showing me the same 25-30 friends, blanking the other 3K. I noticed sub-conciously and stopped looking at the feed for months, but would just post my articles since I am a journalist. So I decided to do an experiment. Every day I would snooze 5 of those friends for a month. Would the algorithm replace them with 5 others. It didn’t and I was down to just 5 friends after some days. I logged in all day and was shown a static feed of those 5 friends. So I snoozed those 5 and waited next day for nothing.

But no, dozens of new friends popped up who I hadn’t seen in the feed for years. So I kept up my experiment and started snoozing 5 friends a day. After a few months, I was probably seeing the posts a 100+ friends, but still not the other 3K plus. Why does Facebook do this? Why does it thrust a useless algorithm down my throat? Why can’t I see all 3K friends in real time? Because then my feed would be totally different even if I checked 10 times a day instead of becoming static if I log in 2-3 times a day. I guess it also worked the other way around as some people messaged me asking: Why weren’t you on Facebook for all these years? Also in the last few years I got practically zero friend requests. Maybe 1 a month at best. And now I am getting dozens of friend requests a day. What is the logic of that?

Silicon Valley Social Media claims to have a domain of billions of pages, billions of videos, billions of articles posted by billions of people, but it will never show you that ocean. It will take a glass from that ocean and tell you that you are allowed to see that only and nothing else.

It’s very difficult to capture power in West Bengal…

bridge-167041_960_720We had to have the violent and long-running Naxalism movement that disrupted the State forever, the political uncertainty of 1967-72, which saw many aaya ram gaya ram Chief Ministers and the sheer tyranny of Congress Chief Minister SS Ray (that shut the party out of the State forever) before the CPM could come to power.
Mamata Banerjee found herself as the Chief Opposition after the 1996, 2001 and 2006 Assembly elections (hence her stints at the Centre to bide her time) before she could claim the throne in 2011.
The BJP has just now grabbed the mantle of Chief Opposition of West Bengal in 2021.
The other side of the coin: It’s very difficult to lose power in Bengal too…
From 1947-77, 30 years, the Congress was either the Ruler or Chief Disruptor. It was a tragedy of errors that led to their exit.
The CPM ruled from 1977-2011, a record 34 years.
And even now Mamata has got three straight terms and will see herself as a favourite for 2026 too.