A friend of mine made the decision to block me from his feed on Facebook, due (I mostly assume) to political differences and the conflicts that have arisen because of them. Honestly, I am not bothered by this. Historically, he has been well to my right, though that changed around 2010 when he darted left. For some reason, even though I have plenty of lefty friends, it has made relations considerably more difficult.

Anyway, because I was not unfriended, he still shows up in the feed to the right when he leaves comments on other people’s feeds. You’d think that since he doesn’t want me reading what he has to say on his feed, Facebook, that they’d get a clue that it’s probably best that he doesn’t show up there either and that we should remain Friends In Name Only or somesuch.

It’s part-and-parcel to Facebook’s weird inability to determine what should be on my feed. You’d think that the algorithm would say “Hey, he’s commented on this guys’ statuses repeatedly, so this is probably someone whose feed he’s interested in.” But not really. It thinks I really need to know what’s going on with a high school acquaintance who now lives in Connecticut, but not the person who has tagged me in posts twice in the last month.

This is one of the reasons I get less paranoid about their collecting information on me. They seem to be utterly incompetent on what to do with even the obvious parts.

(That said, I started to get ads for state government political races ragging on the DMV. That’s kind of… suspicious.)


Category: Server Room

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3 Responses to Big Data Fail?

  1. Peter says:

    Another perplexing thing FB does is suggest people as friends based on the presence of ONE mutual friend. I would want at least ten mutual friends before sending a friend request. Anything less is being rather presumptive.

    • trumwill says:

      Ten? Really?

      I agree that it’s silly to suggest people based on one, but if there are three or four, that’s a pretty solid endorsement. I won’t always bite, but I often will.

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