Of the main social media platforms out there, I’ve found that I’m on Facebook the least these days. Theres a bunch of reasons for that, mostly surrounding the fact that scrolling my Facebook feed is like flipping the channels on a TV. But the primary reason is the string of suggestions Facebook delivers in the form of products and ads.
Once non-intrusive as a bunch of links on the right, Suggestions in Facebook have now morphed into what amount to commercial interruptions in your timeline. Ads for targeted products, attempts at app signups, tiny videos peddling websites filled with marketed content – the list goes on, but the break in the timeline to present such suggestions is at best annoying and at worst harassing and loud in its presentation.
The funny thing about this is that the feature, intended to target preferences and hobbies for people, is just not that effective. The imperfection of the suggestion algorithm is likely to blame for this, as 7 suggested posts for one offhand mention of a movie you liked or talked about just seems to make suggestions clumsy as well as irrelevant (no, I don’t need daily suggestions leading me to vague T-shirt sites selling quotes from Big Trouble in Little China). Then there’s the fact that suggestions as a whole lack quality control. It’s not the more well-known companies that use suggestions, but ones you’d never normally visit looking to gather customer base through scattering ad placement in Facebook. I get why this is the case, but it doesn’t make it any more effective.
It’s true that there are cobbled-together workarounds to suppress Suggestions in Facebook but they’re typically a band aid for the greater problem of cluttering Facebook overall. Between a ton of friend posts, shared content, and links, Facebook feeds are already mired in a bunch of posts that people struggle to keep up with. Adding the interruptions that Suggestions create only makes this problem worse. The funny thing is that Suggestions as they are now, without adjustment or granular options, are actually more likely to be ignored than read despite their in-your-face method of delivery. It’s certainly ironic, considering the definition of the feature.
