All Those Babies in Your Facebook Feed Could Just Be Your Imagination
2014.04.12
If you're approaching your 30s, you're most likely to have friends with kids. Now, you can join the bandwagon of people complaining that babies are now taking over your Facebook feed. But according to some research, it might just all be in your head.
Over at Wired, the article points some findings of a scientist at Microsoft Research. It turns out there may be less babies than there are on Facebook after all.
After a child is born, Morris discovered, new mothers post less than half as often. When they do post, fewer than 30 percent of the updates mention the baby by name early on, plummeting to not quite 10 percent by the end of the first year. Photos grow as a chunk of all postings, sure—but since new moms are so much less active on Facebook, it hardly matters. New moms aren't oversharers. Indeed, they're probably undersharers. "The total quantity of Facebook posting is lower," Morris says.
The reason for that may be that people "like" baby photos and Facebook tends to resurface those posts with lots of activity. Which means, if your post of your baby has over 100 likes, expect it to show up on someone else's feed as the "top post". Wired also suggests another factor called "frequency effect".
Once we notice something that annoys or surprises or pleases us—or something that's just novel—we tend to suddenly notice it more. We overweight its frequency in everyday life.
So don't be too quick to judge. You may just be a victim of your own imagination. Ok, time to post 20 pictures of my kid on Facebook now. [Image via]More Articles
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