
When You Fall in Love, This Is What Facebook Sees - bvaldivielso
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/02/when-you-fall-in-love-this-is-what-facebook-sees/283865/
======
hawkharris
We might be missing the point here by focusing on romantic relationships.

The fact that people make fewer posts on Facebook as they become closer might
mean something, in general, about the kinds of relationships that Facebook
sustains.

Facebook is the modern equivalent of a Christmas card...It's a way of
maintaining surface-level contact with many people: letting them know that you
care...but you don't _necessarily_ care enough to catch up through a more
direct and personal medium.

Communicating with your closest friends or your partner mainly through a
Christmas card would be silly, in my opinion; we tend to choose less distant
methods of communication. So, it's not surprising that people would exchange
fewer posts with close friends, as well as romantic partners, as they get to
know them.

Those are just my two cents, speaking from experience and observation. I'm
sure HN has a range of opinions about this, and I'm interested in hearing
other people's perspectives.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
I think the sociological term you are looking for is "weak ties" [1] -
Facebook (minus Messenger) appears to be a platform for weak ties more than
strong. There are social, strategic, financial, and political benefits to
maintaining a network of weak ties [2].

[1]
[https://www.stanford.edu/dept/soc/people/mgranovetter/docume...](https://www.stanford.edu/dept/soc/people/mgranovetter/documents/granstrengthweakties.pdf)

[2]
[http://personal.stevens.edu/~ysakamot/BIA658/man/week4/burt....](http://personal.stevens.edu/~ysakamot/BIA658/man/week4/burt.pdf)

------
primitivesuave
A couple years ago, when I was still on Facebook, I got in this big fight with
my girlfriend. I unfriended her on Facebook as a childish act of vengeance,
and I noticed that the ads on the side suddenly turned into ads for dating
websites. Maybe it was just me, but from the looks of it, Facebook thought I
had broken up with my significant other and was targeting ads based on this
assumption.

It was then that I realized that every inference they make about you means big
business. It means they can now target ads specific to your relationship
tendencies on Valentines day, her birthday, his birthday, on your anniversary
date, and so on. They can also pick up on events like break-ups and target ads
toward you even then. Just another manifestation of Big Data.

~~~
saurik
What I find most fascinating about these kinds of situations is that it isn't
clear that Facebook even "knows" this information, despite taking advantage of
the "knowledge": they have a massive statistical inference system that notices
certain kinds of events cluster with certain kinds of behaviors, leading to
differing reactions to potential advertisements; so, while the website clearly
has learned something about you, and if it were sentient might be able to have
a really scary conversation with you, past asking the question "show me users
who are likely to click on dating ads today" (which is a sufficiently
different question as to require its own inferences and leading to its own
errors) a developer at Facebook might not have "access" to this knowledge any
more than a brain surgeon can use your brain to figure out who your mother is.
In fact, these data scientists working their way through the data themselves
are only now "discovering" something their ad engine already "understood" a
long time ago, and while them knowing it explicitly might help them improve
the UI of their website, it likely won't help their ad optimizer as the
optimizer might already be "smarter" than they are.

~~~
noonespecial
Its starting to sound an awful lot like when skynet wakes up it won't be a
terrifying overlord, but rather like a crazy old lady that no one really
understands who sells kitsch and loves cats.

------
fudged71
"Facebook might understand your romantic prospects better than you do."

This article makes me angry.

4 years ago, I met a girl and we added each other on Facebook. For a year, she
saw my posts, but Facebook was hiding all her posts from me.

Ultimately we ran into each other again and fell in love. But it really sucks
that I didn't see that year of her life while it was happening. Facebook
simply decided not to show her in my timeline.

I wish that my friendships and relationships were not judged by an algorithm
or censored without my knowledge. Machine learning et al are great for
numerical tasks, but let's not try to treat emotions quantitatively. I would
hope that we have a better sense of our emotions than computers reading just a
fraction of my communications with someone.

~~~
72deluxe
Couldn't you have met up and shared pictures or looked at photo albums, like
they did in the 80s?

~~~
JetSpiegel
Not for Hacker News denizens.

There's probably a startup idea here. Digitalize photo albums and show them on
a web interface.

~~~
Consultant32452
I would argue: not for anyone under 30. These kids eat up social media like
it's going out of style.

~~~
72deluxe
I am 30 next month, and I don't consume social media at the same rate as
others. I still enjoy meeting up or ringing people! My brother who is 37 dines
at the fast-food serving social media restaurant far more than I do. He
practically drives through! Wittily (and entirely seriously), he asked me "Do
you use Twitter? It's like free text messaging!".....

Perhaps I am a bit of a stick in the mud? Besides, if I liked a girl as the
parent said, I would much rather be with her (literally!) than feeling cheated
that I couldn't observe portions of her life that she chose to share as served
to my handheld device. It's like viewing life through a tiny viewfinder
instead of looking around a bit more.

Different lifestyles I suppose.

------
mbateman
What exactly are those data points? I doubt they are individuals, they
wouldn't wrap so tightly around the curve around such a tiny scale (between
1.5 and 1.7 timeline posts per day).

This looks like a very small effect but one with a very distinct form so I'd
be curious to see the details.

~~~
ottocoder
I was thinking along the same lines. With millions of users, I suppose it
makes sense that you can see "average" number of posts per day change when a
relationship changes, but at the individual level how could the algorithm tell
if it is a change in relationship or somebody was having a good week and felt
like being chatty (of course these options aren't mutually exclusive! :) ).

------
billyjobob
If Facebook can predict when a relationship is due to begin, why not just set
the relationship status automatically? They must be doing this internally even
if they don't display it.

Or how about they notify all your friends: "John is sharing 1.65 posts/day
with Janet but only 1.32 posts/day with his girlfriend Jane. Click here to
suggest he dumps Jane and starts a new relationship with Janet."

~~~
NamTaf
That's undoubtably their end goal. Even if it's not made public, they would
then use it to target ads. Basically, if they can accurately predict human
behaviours before the humans can, they can target the ads at the most
effective point in time.

~~~
batiudrami
Reminds me of that story of Target sending marketing material to a pregnant
teenage girl before her father knew.

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-
targe...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-
figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/)

------
diydsp
What exactly kind of graph is this? I see three plots: a blue line, a thick
purple segment and black speckles. None of them are labelled.

Is one of them a mean, for example? What is the variance in these data? My gf
and I only post on each other's pages once per month, max, for example, yet we
ust be part of this "study." The variance is especially important because the
six-month span from top to bottom (1.66 - 1.54 = 0.12) is large compared to
mean of the whole graph (~1.60).

What kind of selection criteria were used to create this graph? How many
couples? What ages? What countries? (I don't accept "worldwide" b/c I don't
accept that people of all countries post at the same rate).

This "information" has all the marks of Facebook trumpeting their macho data
muscles to impress advertisers and the Atlantic flexing their paranoia muscle
to stoke reader's outrage. I suspect those black dots are simply graphical
saccharine to give the aesthetic appearance of "data."

~~~
baking
Exactly. It's just a minor effect that Facebook can detect using their massive
database and use to convince advertisers to pay a premium for, even though
there is no evidence of how good a predictor it is. How many people that have
a slight increase in their cross-posting actually get into a relationship?
Using bad data science used to sell ads.

------
spodek
I can't help but compare the second plot in the story, which plots "Positive
emotions level" by time, to my passion-attraction model, which plots the same
-- [http://joshuaspodek.com/visual-model-understand-
passion](http://joshuaspodek.com/visual-model-understand-passion).

Mine is just for fun, or rather just to speculate on something interesting
from a geeky perspective to see what that perspective reveals about ourselves.
Soon after making it I saw a plot some guy made of the number of texts between
him and his girlfriend that vaguely resembled my plots. The Facebook plot
doesn't continue to a relationship's decline, so it can't compare completely,
but it does suggest we can quantify some interesting patterns and see what
they reveal about us.

If there's anything most of us would like, it's to understand our passions and
attractions to improve these emotions and the relationships they lead to.

It would be sad if the only entities using the data were companies that sell
ads like Facebook and Google, and not ourselves.

Also, if you like data analysis like this on relationships, be sure to check
out Okcupid's Oktrends -- [http://blog.okcupid.com](http://blog.okcupid.com).

~~~
normloman
Where exactly do you derive your passion / attraction model from? Where's the
data supporting this? I must confess, I haven't finished your article yet. But
I don't see any hard data besides the aforementioned text messages... a single
data point.

------
solidsnack9000
1.53 and 1.67 doesn't seem like a big difference.

~~~
sousousou
Maybe this is something that is visible on a large scale but appears more or
less random when zoomed in to a particular couple.

~~~
jmount
I would guess you are correct: that the signal is pretty weak per individual
couple (to the point of not being usable) but shows up with this nice tight
graph when you aggregate data.

------
cyphunk
This is selective after the fact analysis. The data of how people behave
before and after a relationship positive apex (two people becoming a couple)
is irrelevant unless compared with those with a negative apex as well (those
that did not become a couple).

------
jsun
In my experience the data presented here shows the need to cut further or
obtain additional data. There's some correlation, but the data appears to be a
rough aggregate and the absolute magnitude of the movement is small. Also
unclear if cyclical or macro effects were removed. Pretty much all the other
comments here are anecdotal or attempted to draw conclusions from insufficient
data.

This is why pop psychology is generally reviled by psychologists.

------
dionidium
I'd like to see a graph of my own personal interactions with each of my FB
friends over time. Obviously, I already know what this graph would look like,
but it'd be pretty neat (and maybe a little sad) to see my failed
relationships juxtaposed with the ones that have lasted.

------
disgruntledphd2
Link to the actual note, if anyone is interested:
[https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-data-science/the-
for...](https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-data-science/the-formation-of-
love/10152064609253859)

------
smoyer
I know FB is built to create engagement on their site, but I don't have an FB
account - the data science team posts are amazing and it's the first content
that makes me want to "follow" along. Is there a service to convert FB pages
into RSS feeds?

Edit: I found it here:
[https://www.facebook.com/feeds/notes.php?id=8394258414&viewe...](https://www.facebook.com/feeds/notes.php?id=8394258414&viewer=0&key=AWjDEHR4mDKInNmC&format=rss20)
\- I didn't realize I'd have to click through the "see more" link on the time-
line.

------
CodeTrekker
I can't believe some PhD is being paid to write this sort of trivial stuff

~~~
gedrap
Oh there a lot of them. Really a lot. People often do those so that could get
a visa as a student which is difficult to obtain otherwise :)

------
gedrap
I remember reading on HN that some US supermarket [0] could predict pregnancy
based on shopping. So they would start sending baby-care products offers
before the couples found about it. They ceased doing that because people found
it just too creepy. Any more remembers more?

[0] a really large one, so that I recognised it's brand while never been
outside Europe

~~~
silencio
The store was Target. The story was that a teenage girl was buying things
there that was indicative of pregnancy and her father found out through the
ads they sent her.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-
habits.h...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-
habits.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0)

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-
targe...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-
figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/)

------
crusso
The y axis on that graph could be swapped out for "attention to exercise and
personal appearance".

------
amjaeger
It would be more interesting to also see the stats about IM's between two
people. Also does their study account for all the teenage girls that post that
they are in a relationship with their best (girl) friend?

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kfk
Wow, 100 days, that's over 3 months, what can they possibly be sharing/talking
over 100 days? So we are saying this people are "trading" the outcome of 2-3
dates with 100 days of cat pictures sharing? I really don't get the point of
this.

------
awayand
an increasing number of posts leading to a relationship and then a drop in
messages as the couple is spending time together - OMG GENIUS I WOULD HAVE
NEVER GUESSED!!!!

~~~
Houshalter
Hindsight bias devalues science:
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/im/hindsight_devalues_science/](http://lesswrong.com/lw/im/hindsight_devalues_science/)

------
Aloha
This is both creepy, and really cool.

~~~
brazzy
Unless you look at the actual numbers and realize it means absolutely nothing
for individual people.

------
benched
I think a lot of people would have no problem predicting this pattern without
looking at any Facebook data. Likewise, the participants and their more
observant friends surely know that a relationship is likely to happen well
before it becomes official. Relationships mostly follow the same course. I
guess it's mildly interesting to actually see it in a more concrete form.

------
Toenex
Anecdotally I can confirm. I've been happily married for 15 years and I've
never even heard of Facebook.

