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 happens only in Facebook…

• Real World
A & B are chatting…
C comes along and A says to C (pointing to B): We’re friends.
Virtual World
Facebooker A and Facebooker B are chatting.
A: Who are you?
B: We’re friends!

• “Real”ly…
Just because I don’t say it, it doesn’t mean that I don’t love you.
Virtually…
Just because I don’t comment, it doesn’t mean that I haven’t read your Status Message (Or seen your picture/album etc)

• A common dilemma…
To update or not to update, that’s the question.

• “A birthday a day” means you’re looking at your Facebook Events section.

© Sunil Rajguru