Friend Suggestions

When Facebook enticed us, for me 2009, it offered a chance to reconnect forty years after receiving our HS diplomas.  I promptly requested Friends with HS and Hebrew School acquaintances, a few folks from college, and but a handful of personal relatives and people from my town.  Most requests initiated by me were accepted, though girls who marginalized me in HS sometimes declined.  That list settled at about 100.  The algorithm has changed dramatically over the ensuing fifteen years, so maybe about ten of those hundred appear on my feed over a year, not counting birthday notices.  A few died along the way.  But Facebook's business model has clearly shifted from connecting old friends with each other to separating subscribers from a portion of their money, or maybe enraging them in some way.  No new Friend requests have come my way, and I've not offered to connect with anyone else.

Despite this, as I scroll through the messages that the algorithm concludes might keep me preferentially on their screens instead of Twitter's, I can expect to come across a banner of a couple dozen suggestions to initiate new Facebook friends a few times a day.  I scrolled through them.  No doubt, others get their banners with my picture, scrolling past without action, much as I do with my list.

If we have a lot of mutual friends, indicated under the photos, they are probably people from HS, as that is where my FB Friends derive.  If only one or two, which is most of them, they could be anyone's acquaintance or relative.  And many indicated no mutual Friends.  Occasionally a public figure appears.  My own posts early in the FB longevity, included occasional Likes, even verbal responses, from a few men of professional fame, though not recently.  Still, public figures pop up.  One recent one, a sleaze of political notoriety, listed a mutual friend.  She shares that man's political opinions, but I can attest that she is not personally deplorable.  

FB gives the viewer the option of deleting suggested people so that they do not reappear as suggestions, and hopefully my photo gets blocked from their suggested people.  This public blight was one of the few that got my deep six.  He's not appeared since.  There are a few others along the way, people I know locally who I regret forcing to share a communal space.  They get the FB request to make their profile disappear from my suggested contacts.  There aren't very many of those.  It wouldn't really matter, as neither of us would initiate contact with the other.

That leaves me with my ten or so.  All fondly remembered from decades past, though for most I am probably closer to them on Social Media than I was in the Ramapo Senior High School building or school bus.  And there's a secondary ten, people who used to show up more frequently, people of amiable presence and nimble mind worthy of a few sentences exchange.  The FB algorithm has done me a disservice, reducing their frequency on my screen. 

While their business model depends on my staring preferentially at their screens, FB has rightly become rationed time.  None of my current Semi-Annual initiatives require any Social Media.  More accurately, it is destructive to all these intermediate goals.  So putting an array of potential Friends expansions that nobody wants really doesn't keep me glued to the screen or the sponsors for any significant duration.  I'm content with my hundred or so reconnections from fifteen years back.  The ten active, the ten less frequent, and the eighty dormant.