Just today I noticed people with descriptions like “Director of Product at Facebook”, “Product Design Manager at Facebook”, “Journalist Program Manager at Facebook”, etc. being suggested to me as friends (although the terminology has been changed from “suggested” to “People To Subscribe To” :dubious:). All of them have only 1 friend in common with me.
Is this some sort of new marketing ploy by Facebook?
Is it a scam by people other than Facebook trying to gain credibility by claiming to be various important sounding management types at Facebook?
Is anyone else seeing this?
I have no intention of “subscribing” to any of these people.
Were a lot of people complaining about the new Facebook layout today in your feed? I wonder if that triggered their suggestion engine to suggest people who work at places that match hot topics on your feed?
I think “subscribe to” is supposed to be a way of following a celebrity or other well known person, much like you’d follow them on Twitter. I have no idea why you’d want to subscribe to these people, but I don’t think it’s quite the same as suggesting friends to you.
The Friend suggestions are one of the reasons I closed my account. I had no idea how these people were selected or why I would want them as friends. And they kept showing up on the list again and again after I had already deleted them from it.
I think audiobottle is correct that “subscribe to” is a different thing from “suggest”. But it seems similar in that it only suggested subscriptions that had at least 1 friend in common with me.
ZipperJJ, no I don’t think there was much discussion about Facebook in my feed, so I don’t think that’s what caused it.
Most of them seemed to have one particular friend in common with me, so maybe he subscribed to all of them for some reason, though I can’t imagine why he would want to do that.