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-- Facebook is being creepy
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quote:

Originally posted by Jon_Snow Oh Lira

Hello there, sir

I'm suprised no one has mentioned this yet but apparently people you may know is quite often people who have recently been looking you up on facebook. She's probably found you somehow (through friends of friends maybe) and has been stalking you.

Lira has already said that. And one of these girls never knew my full name and I never knew hers.

I'm quite sure data giants like Facebook use machine learning to great extents for this stuff. For example a well trained neural network (what they use at least for showing the right ads to the right people) can find patterns in a huge set of data, even when for a human everything in that data set would seem completely random. Probably these things are responsible for that "creepiness", since it's kind of a hallmark of neural networks in some way; noticing something we don't. In other words, there's something other than the fact you dated connecting you, you just don't know what neither do the developers, necessarily.

I personally wait for the day Facebook starts friend-suggesting me people I met physically and hung around with for some time (given I let Facebook access my location at all times), but had no connection to on Facebook. Probably even now that's just one semi-complex SQL query away for them.

Or they just looked you up, like everyone else said. You must be some hot stuff, man.

quote:

Originally posted by Lira Hello there, sir

At least you're not using drums or smoke signals to save money.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_cookie

Hey that's genius.

quote:

Originally posted by Psyshell I'm suprised no one has mentioned this yet but apparently people you may know is quite often people who have recently been looking you up on facebook. She's probably found you somehow (through friends of friends maybe) and has been stalking you.

Really? Had no idea of this.

Who said I'm not using drums to communicate, IGK?!

quote:

Originally posted by SYSTEM-J Lira has already said that. And one of these girls never knew my full name and I never knew hers.

Can't have been me, I'm saying this was a coincidence all along!

Seriously, let's do some maths here. Suppose you have 200 Facebook friends (Facebook's most common friend number) and you've interacted with 10000 people your entire adult life. There are 60 million Brits britting in Britain. That's like looking for needles in a haystack, right? Not really.

If your friends have in average, 200 friends as well, you'd have 40000 people with mutual friends to choose from (200 x 200) - if everyone you've interacted with fell into this group, you'd know 1 out of every 4 people Facebook recommends (40000 / 10000). That's what Facebook would do if it only recommended people you've got a mutual friend with. That's a terrible way of looking at things because you can't know all of your friends' friends.

If we take this one step further, we now have 8 million people. That's an incredibly large sum, right? No way you could pick these 8 million people at random and find someone you know. However, they're not evenly distributed, because not everyone knows the same amount of people - some are more popular (I'm going to call them nodes) and some aren't. These nodes attract larger groups, and you've got to have incredibly popular nodes around you.

This makes sorting your friends' friends a lot easier (people you no longer share mutual friends with), because with few database queries Facebook can analyse which friends of yours interact with the same nodes... And I'm not even taking into account similar interests, which would make this a lot easier. So, out of the 8 million friends' friends, if these nodes have 800 friends in average (they're 4 times more popular than you), Facebook would sort between groups of 640 thousand people (Just 8% of that population of 8 million people). That's a lot, sure, but then Facebook would have to pick only those nodes that interact with you, which would make that percentage spike (I'm not going to take this into account, we've seen enough numbers here). The thing is, you're more likely to interact with them because they're more popular than you, and Facebook is more likely to use their help to filter its results.

If Facebook suggests 20 people to you every single day, that's 7300 people a year (or 11% of those 640 thousand people from the previous paragraph). Odds are you'd see one familiar face out of every 100 people if nothing else were relevant (or 1 every 5 days). Of course there are more variables and you'd expect the system to do better than that (my numbers were educated guesses anyway, so I'm not going for accuracy here), but the system should do better than that. Mind you, it works better with some people (e.g. you) than with others (e.g. me).

Cor version: You don't need any black magic to spot your romantic interests after a while. It helps, sure, but it really is a small world after all.

quote:

Originally posted by Lira Can't have been me, I'm saying this was a coincidence all along!

It was in the article you linked.

You don't need to give me the maths lesson, because I'm familiar with the idea you're talking about. We forget all the everyday events because there's nothing unusual about them and we notice the anomalies so they seem significant, even though statistically their probability is likely to be very normal given the sample size. Statistics very often cluster rather than being evenly distributed so a chain of seemingly significant events can occur in short order, strengthening the false impression. Meanwhile, billions of unmemorable non-coincidences are happening every single day in the background and are ignored by the mind.

I don't really buy into it because my Facebook account simply isn't churning through the suggestions as you're saying it does. There isn't the sample size for these things to crop up. Of course, given one billion Facebook users it's possible that I'm the one with the incredibly unlikely coincidence and it had to happen to someone. But I'm going into the SIM card explanation, especially as Lews reports similar findings. I remember Facebook in the past clearly suggesting friends based on the contacts in my email account I'd signed up with.

I was just watching Louis CK on YouTube and now Facebook's saying I should add him as a friend.

I think I'm going to delete the FB app from my phone. Despite being very selective with my friends list, and blocking/hiding much inane and misinformed crap from my newsfeed daily, I still find the content on FB to have a mostly negative impact on my thoughts.

What's Facebook?

I got rid of mine a month ago - again.

Although, this time, I defriended everyone and deleted everything on my profile so I wouldn't be tempted to come back - again.

McDonald's for your mind, if you ask me.

Would you 'like' likes with that?

Facebook is extremely useful if you're a clubber. There are whole private groups dedicated to organising illegal raves. I've been to some incredible parties that were organised entirely in secret on Facebook. And if you Like your favourite DJs, promoters and clubs you get to find out about everything coming up in one centralised feed, rather than having to go around dozens of artist and club websites every week to stay in the loop.

I've also added people on Facebook after meeting them on a night out, people who I'd probably never have spoken to again otherwise, and ended up becoming good friends with them. One guy added me on Facebook at an afterparty who lived at the other end of the country. One day he saw I was going to a party not too far from him so he turned up, we got chatting and ended up becoming really good friends. Within a year of meeting we went to Sonar festival in Barcelona together. That whole chain of events would simply never have occurred if I'd just saved some randomer's number in my phone.

I'm not even going to get into other the many other benefits it has. It's a pretty simple formula: don't add people you don't like, delete anyone who annoys you, keep your friends list closely cropped and Like and follow everything that interests you culturally or socially. You end up with an all-in-one resource for keeping up with music, film-makers, authors, events and friends.

Simply put, if you think it's McDonalds for the mind that's because you're only ordering from the kids' menu.

I'm inclined to agree with Sys here - and for the opposite reason.

Rather than creating my own bubble with interests and like-minded people, Facebook is great for disrupting my "comfort zone" and showing what other people are doing and thinking about. I've subscribed to dozens of newspapers feeds from all over the world, for example, so I can have at least three different takes on every issue - and my friends often bring up novel opinions of their own. I can count on my fingers how many people I've ever unsubscribed, let alone unfriended since I first joined. Following the DJ's I like doesn't really matter much when you're in the middle of the Amazon

If being vulnerable to Skynet is the price to pay for all this knowledge, call me Faust and take me to cyberhell

Sure, buddy.

I've worked in content marketing, so I know all of its benefits, both professionally and personally.

It's a matter of preference, I guess. There's no need to disparage my opnion by saying shit like "you're only ordering from the kids menu."

Typical Jack, though. Congrats on liking Facebook, lol. I'm sure it likes you, too.

quote:

Originally posted by OrangestO Sure, buddy. I've worked in content marketing, so I know all of its benefits, both professionally and personally. It's a matter of preference, I guess. There's no need to disparage my opnion by saying shit like "you're only ordering from the kids menu." Typical Jack, though. Congrats on liking Facebook, lol. I'm sure it likes you, too.

Give me a break, Captain Insecure. You're disparaging anyone who uses it by implying they're feeding their mind junk food, with the reciprocal implication that you are in some way highbrow for shunning it. Which is typical OrangestO. You love to make little self-congratulatory references to being a "writer" when you write web copy about toasters and you talk about your "journey through music" which involves discovering decade-old prog mixes. This Facebook thing is perfectly illustrative: you clearly think of yourself as some kind of leftfield thinking man walking a special path in life when really you're just a fucking doylem who doesn't even have the nous to get social media right.

quote:

Originally posted by OrangestO Sure, buddy. I've worked in content marketing, so I know all of its benefits, both professionally and personally. It's a matter of preference, I guess. There's no need to disparage my opnion by saying shit like "you're only ordering from the kids menu." Typical Jack, though. Congrats on liking Facebook, lol. I'm sure it likes you, too.

Editing, content marketing, and now jobless.

Sounds legit.

tldr

Just like most people's stupid FB posts.

I now totally see why someone like you would like FB, lol.

You should content market yourself, and edit your life with employment.

Nothing says "serious writer" like "Too long, didn't read".

I will eventually.

Freelance writing and travel blogging is just too fun right now.

You're right.

A "serious writer" must know how to filter the content he or she is exposed to on a daily basis.

Lurking and posting on TA is the one habit I'm still trying to kick in this regard.

Copy edit: Mom's spaghetti. You're a slightly more literate version of Paulino.

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