I just got the latest batch of friend recommendations. I always click each name I don’t recognize, in case something might jar my memory. But lately, more than half of the suggestions are random people I don’t even have any mutual friends with, and with those where a location is listed, they’re in random locations around the world. Places I’ve never been anywhere near,[sup]1[/sup] and places where I don’t know a soul.
I don’t get it. Does Facebook have some fixed number of people it’s supposed to suggest, and just start picking random profiles if it falls short of its quota? Or what?
[sup]1[/sup]Considering how much Facebook seems to know about me, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume they know of everywhere I’ve ever travelled.
The algorithm probably does backfill with recommendations of lesser quality if it doesn’t have higher quality recos. Recommendation engines often operate that way; the UI asks for a specific amount and algorithm must always return that number or the UI won’t be able to display properly.
The people in question may have some common interests or friends of the 2nd order to you. It’s also possible that you are in a pool used for testing new algorithms, and they may be odd for a reason.
A large percentage of Facebook accounts are fakes set up by spammers. (One stat I saw recently was 60%. Who knows how anyone figures these things out.) One goal is to get this fake accounts friended to people and then start pushing ads to their “friends”.
I suspect somone you know accepts friend requests from these clowns and now you are getting friend requests by transitivity.
It doesn’t have to be mutual friends; it could be friends of friends. Or common interests at some point. Or some other things that the algorithm is matching on that isn’t obvious to you.
It’s got to be this. Because if you go in and manually remove everyone, it doesn’t continue backfilling. It usually takes a few weeks to pick up anyone else.
Oh, and I loathe it when people add spammers. Their profiles are freaking obvious.
Yeah, in the past I’ve gotten a lot of suggestions that are hot young babes, and they’re always mutual friends with the same “friend” of mine. But the ones with no mutual friends have been normal looking people, from all walks.
It usually happens twice a week for me. In fact, this past Wednesday, a good number of the recommendations were people I remember; today, those were all wiped out and I didn’t know a single person in this latest batch. However, of the ones from today I had mutual friends with, in each case the mutual friend was someone I added this week. That makes sense - Facebook is saying “Ooooo, he has a new friend! He must know everyone else on their friends list!”
Similar “likes” is an interesting thought. Next time I’ll have to look at some of my “pages” and see if any of these mystery people show up.