How Facebook keeps getting more addictive

- "not so long ago everyone thought Facebook was close to saturation"

- "now suddenly they managed to increase the number of users"

Maybe "everyone" was wrong? In any case, faking such numbers on a large scale would require a decent-sized conspiracy among at least a couple of department heads. Also, it would be quite illegal. And, being a digital thing, very easy for someone to prove.

However, it's possible that the way they characterize numbers has changed, but those details would presumably be in the official filings and financial reports. For example, in recent years, the newspapers audit circulation bureau has changed readership numbers to include categories of web users, not just print circulation. And even before the web, the numbers included an estimated number of readers who read non-bought copies of a paper (i.e., papers left at the coffee shop and passed around).

So there could be different standards of counting...in fact, that's a much easier, more legal way of doing things before you start maliciously faking stats.

Supposedly though FB has held itself (and FBX, which is overall a great product, in particular) as 'fraud-free.'[3] Dunno about that, especially since faking likes is trivial. Anyone who knows how to operate a search engine can do it in less than five minutes.

[1]http://blogs.wsj.com/cmo/2014/03/23/online-advertisings-cris... [2]http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2329878/Facebook-Ad-Fra... [3]http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-11-26/how-facebook...

Let's assume you have ~500 friends. Assume each of those friends posts at least once a day. That's 500 posts per day that you'd need to sift through, in chronological order. There's no way most people would be able to do that, maintaining a clear mental backlog day in and day out, and consistently find the comments they like. This would be a serious needle-in-the-haystack problem. The brute force of one's time, reading speed, and strength of intent might be able to solve it for maybe a few days before giving up.

And those numbers are simplistic estimates. If anything, they are spectacularly conservative.

I'm not suggesting that FB's methods always get things right. There's a LOT of room for improvement. But some automated sorting process is better than its complete absence, as much as we'd like to think it's not. Most people can't process as much information as comes through a typical news feed on a typical week.

Now, what about email? Isn't that similar? Don't some of us, especially in busy offices, get hundreds of emails a day and manage just fine? Sure. The difference is that most email is pre-"selected" for us, on account of the sender's intent that we read it. We're not just being bombarded by every stray thought that occurs to senders. We're not being cc'ed on all the email our contacts send. A completely unsorted Facebook newsfeed would be a bit like getting cc'ed on every email sent by your network, every day.