Assignment 2 - Don't Like Anything On Facebook

For the second assignment, I conducted an experiment using Facebook and the “like” feature.  Normally, I am not a very active Facebook user to begin with, although when I do use or browse the website, I generally just “like” things my friends will post, or I will “like” pages. I hardly share or upload new content on there these days, so I figured why not stop liking things altogether for a couple days and see what happens? Maybe my Facebook feed would become more interesting, and maybe then I would feel more inclined to use the site more frequently.  

I had been browsing and lurking my Facebook feed for a couple days leading up to this experiment, and I noticed that my feed consisted of updates from friends who’s profiles I had visited recently, updates from pages I had recently liked, updates from friends I had recently added, and updates from friends who’s posts I had recently liked more than anything else. Granted, there were a few random posts thrown in the mix, but those all stood out to me the most.

After I stopped liking things for a few days, I noticed that my feed became more and more neutral. In other words, there was no direct indication as to why certain things were appearing on my feed.  It seemed as if more people who liked my personal posts were appearing on my feed, as opposed to people whose post I liked myself. It was sort of hard to tell for certain if this was the direction my feed was taking, because I only stopped liking posts for about a week. One reason I felt this might be the case is because some of the people who I see like my posts I never really interact with myself. My feed still seemed to be flooded with a lot of spam and advertisements despite my experiment.  Also, a ton of posts from artist, movie, etc. pages that I had liked in the recent past were also flooding my news feed. In fact, I almost noticed more of those kinds of posts, as well as the advertisements, as opposed to posts from friends I know in real life. This could have just been me personally. I am not sure if my results would have been swayed if I hadn’t liked a bunch of posts right before conducting this experiment, or if I had gone a longer time without liking anything. 

• Less friends I interact with on my news feed
• More friends who like my posts on my feed
• A more neutral feed than before overall
• Feed still flooded with advertisements 
• Feed also flooded with pages I liked in the past