So I’ve thought facebook was weird for probably a couple years now. It seems like there’s a solid rotating roster of about 10-15 people who always end up liking/commenting on my statuses. However, that’s sort of weird since I think I usually put out good content and interesting things and I have 1000 friends. It’s also weird that I tend to see the same people on my own news feed posting stuff. So my thought is that either
1.) There’s some sort of algorithm controlling what other people see on their walls, much like what Facebook is known to do for it’s “pages”. I may have 1000 friends but when people scroll through their news feed they only see a small percentage of what’s actually posted in reality.
2.) Facebook is dying and all these people are on Twitter/IG
3.) I’m a terrible person that no one likes and only 1% of my Facebook friends actually enjoy me.
Anyone have any insights into what may be going on?
I’m not sure what this has to do with the Facebook API, but:
There are a lot of people on Facebook who basically use it as an address book and never comment/post
A lot of your friends probably have you marked as “acquaintance.” When that happens they’ll see a lot less of what you post in their news feeds. You won’t know if you are an acquaintance unless you ask them.
Some of your friends may have unfollowed you, in which case they will not see anything you post, unless they go to your page directly, but they remain friends. You will not know if they unfollowed you unless you ask them.
Facebook attempts to tailor its news feed to find items that you will be interested in. If you reliably interact with posts by certain persons, then more stuff from those people will appear in your feed.
One way to tell if someone has unfriended you is by going to their FB page and seeing the ‘Add Friend’ button on it.
I have hundreds of friends myself, but only a dozen or so comment on my posts. I assume that because the vast majority of my friends never see my posts (they don’t check Facebook constantly and a lot of other posts are happening at the same time as mine, or they see my post and don’t bother to ‘Like’ it or comment on it. Don’t take is personally… I don’t.
Facebook tightly controls what you see in your “News Feed” and who your posts are shown to based on highly engineered algorithms that are constantly changing.
Basically, you tell Facebook what you like with your actions and they try to send you more stuff like that.
Personally I think the latest algorithm sucks. My news feed has gotten very boring.
As another mentioned, you won’t see if he’s just Unfollowed you. I have a distant cousin who asks for comments on the FairTax of 2015; if he does it again I’m Unfollowing him. (I’ve resisted the alternative – actually commenting!)
Facebook changes often and presents different interfaces to different users. (Like many others, I’m involved in Facebook at all only because some families consider it almost anti-social not to participate.)
The latest minor change (or is it just my configuration?) is that where before on-line Friends were shown as either Web or Mobile, now there’s no distinction.
If you click the arrow next next to the “News Feed” link (on the left navbar), you can change the display from “Top Stories” to “Most Recent”. Top Stories applies the filtering algorithm whereas Most Recent just shows you unfiltered crap from all your friends.
But the default for people is Top Stories. As mentioned above, whether they see your post is determined in part by how much Facebook thinks they care about you (based on past interactions) and the importance of the post itself (certain things like relationship changes show up more than trivial things). The exact details public, as far as I know.