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Comment by owlboy | Hacker News Reader

I just assumed someone was going through a database of known FB accounts and triggering the reset looking for people who accept.

It is strange that they appear to be able to avoid being blocked for bulk/frequent requests though. Seems like a big flaw.

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My assumption is that it is engagement juicing. These seem to go out to seldom/casual users a lot of the time, and people respond by logging in and checking things out. Easy way to pump the MAUs

Ah yes, Facebook, famously known for not having enough active users.

It's not that they don't have enough, it's that they try to always get more. If they no longer have anything to engage you with as you turned it all off, you will get a notification for some random post "we thought this might be interesting to you". And even if you always manually disable all possible options related to this particular notification, they will always find a way to nag you more.

You know it's not outlandish that either an engineer or a team

a) did this intentionally to improve their KPI numbers

b) did this accidentally-ish but won't roll it back because it's making their team's KPIs look good and is playing dumb

Yeah, this is not far fetched as I noticed this only on an account I haven't been using for a long time, and in the past FB engaged in a ton of scummy tactics to force me to log in again.

But to move the needle you would need to do it for millions of accounts.

Which is guaranteed to generate press articles.

I got these reset emails, for email addresses on an account that I use multiple times per day. Same for friends of mine.

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