Assignment 2 : I Liked Everything on Facebook

Facebook tells me I’ve been a user since November 19, 2007, the first couple of years I was very active, posting pictures, liking comments, interacting with friends and all those fun things. It was a very “cool” thing to do, being on Facebook rather than Myspace. As time passed and it became more popular I stopped commenting and became less active to the point of becoming a stalker, as I feel like I’ve been lately. I know just get in when I get a chance to see what my friends are posting. I rarely like or comment on anything. For this past week, for my class assignment I started to like everything I saw, from pictures of babies to Coca-Cola ads and a couple of infamous memes. 

About 5 minutes after I started liking every single post in my feed I received a text message from a very good friend I haven’t spoken to in a couple of weeks. It was a screenshot of me liking a video titled “Shoulder Smashers  - The Way I do It”, it was a very attractive lady working out her shoulders, although I think I liked everything I saw while I was scrolling down, I can't remember liking such video. Less than five minutes later I received another text message, it was another friend sending me another screenshot of me liking a Flour Box Bakery post titled “Braiding hair in the bakery today!” again, I don’t know how this got to my feed.

The feedback I received from my friends, two screenshots in less than 10 minutes was very interesting and made me want to keep on doing this. After 3 minutes of liking posts and refreshing the page it got to the point where I couldn’t keep up with the number of posts in my feed, posts were dramatically increasing as I hit the like button and these were all posts from the same people that I had to stop liking things from the same person, as much as I wanted to do this experiment I didn’t want to annoy any of my friends, or even worst, for them to think I was stalking them.

I liked a picture of a friend I hadn’t spoken to in a few years and that turned into a comment from him which then turned into a very good conversation. The posts I liked kept showing in my friend’s feed, I’m pretty sure I annoyed a couple of them, and I even lost a couple of Facebook friends, my list went from 478 to 475 after the two days of liking posts. 

The changes I noticed after I liked almost everything I saw on Facebook are the following.

• Advertisements increased
• More posts of the things/people I liked showed in my feed
• People unfriended me
• Feed on my phone had more ads than on my computer

According to one of my friends I made this up because I liked a picture of a girl while I was drunk and was trying to cover this up from my girlfriend, but reality is that this exercise helped me to experience in a more clear way how Facebook’s algorithms work, it made me loose a couple of contacts and I probably annoyed a few more of my friends with my likes, perhaps I was even blocked by some more people but it also helped me reconnect with other friends. Now I only wish everything will go back to normal after I leave the like button alone and unlike a couple of pages.