I logged into Facebook for the first time in a couple of months, because sometimes I need to hear from family members and pinball leagues.
I know it used to be a thing that Facebook would have eerily topical recommendations -- that it would put posts into your feed about things you were just talking about, as if it was listening to your conversations. And I remember a couple of investigative podcasters concluding that, it's probably not literally listening to your conversations, but with its combination of location tracking, web tracking, and social network analysis, it might as well be.
Anyway, that's clearly not happening now. My Facebook recommendations are entirely random nonsense. "Trekking in Nepal". An announcement from a middle school I have no connection with. A showing of Die Hard in Nottingham, England. Celebrity gossip about Nicki Minaj. Something written in Tamil.
You'd think it would be able to recommend something about pinball, based entirely on information it makes sense for it to have, such as that all the new people I follow are pinball players and their friends.
But I'm pretty happy that the all-seeing social network has no clue what to recommend (and I wish the algorithmic recommendations simply weren't there). Is it that I've blocked enough web-tracking code? That their app isn't on my phone? Did their algorithm break in a more global way?