{"id":9259,"date":"2011-05-10T14:54:02","date_gmt":"2011-05-10T18:54:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=9259"},"modified":"2011-05-10T14:54:02","modified_gmt":"2011-05-10T18:54:02","slug":"is-facebook-managing-your-friends-for-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2011\/05\/10\/is-facebook-managing-your-friends-for-you\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Facebook “managing” your friends for you?"},"content":{"rendered":"

An interesting (and potentially disturbing) article from Mike Elgan<\/a> may help explain why you don’t see as much activity from some of your Facebook friends as you might expect:<\/p>\n

\n

Every action you take on Facebook — clicking “Like,” commenting, sharing, etc. — is called an “Edge” internally at Facebook. Each Edge is weighted differently according to secret criteria.<\/p>\n

What you need to know is that relationships and content that don’t get enough “Edges” will get “edged” out of existence. Facebook will cut your ties to people — actually end the relationships you think you have — and block content that doesn’t earn enough Edge points.<\/p>\n

For example, many Facebook friendships exist solely through reading each other’s Status Updates. An old friend or co-worker talks about a new job, shares a personal triumph like reaching a weight-loss goal, and tells a story on Mother’s Day about how great his mom is. He posts and you read. You feel connected to his life.<\/p>\n

Without telling you, Facebook will probably cut that connection. Using unpublished criteria, Facebook may decide you don’t care about the person and silently stop delivering your friend’s posts. Your friend will assume you’re still reading his updates. You’ll assume he’s stopped posting.<\/p>\n

Any friends who fail to click or comment on your posts will stop getting your status updates, too. If you have 500 friends, your posts may be actually delivered to only 100 of them. There’s no way for you to know who sees them and who doesn’t.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I don’t use Facebook too often: certainly not every day. My Twitter updates are echoed to Facebook (but not retweets), so I don’t find it surprising that I haven’t seen everyone’s status updates lately: I just assume they’ve scrolled too far down the page by the time I get around to opening Facebook. This article implies that I never had the chance to see many of these status updates because they have “Edged” out of my feed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An interesting (and potentially disturbing) article from Mike Elgan may help explain why you don’t see as much activity from some of your Facebook friends as you might expect: Every action you take on Facebook — clicking “Like,” commenting, sharing, etc. — is called an “Edge” internally at Facebook. Each Edge is weighted differently according […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,15],"tags":[459,391,593],"class_list":["post-9259","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-technology","tag-censorship","tag-facebook","tag-socialmedia"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-2pl","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9259","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9259"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9259\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9260,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9259\/revisions\/9260"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9259"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9259"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9259"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}