People you may know but you wont see
This is not just a rant about how Facebook is broken for me (ok it is) but is also a way to show how this huge company lacks customer service.
You know how nice is that Facebook feature that recommends you people based on friends, schools, places you live or visit, and so on? Sometimes its even scary that you just started a course and its already recommending you classmates for you to add as friends. Well, I don’t. No, I don’t see it because for at least the past 4 years this feature has not worked at all for me.
I’ve been using FB since 2009, all my high school friends use it so I have been able to keep in touch with most of them, FB is really a great way to connect with others, especially those you lost track of. Every now and then I would get a suggestion of someone I knew but haven’t connected in years, so it was nice to be able to say hi and catch up, me being who I am, I really love talking to people, find out what they have been up to and such. But a few years back “People you may know” simply stopped working. The first few months I did not notice it, after a while with every privacy update we get I thought the function was just turned off.
I dig into every setting, every toggle and every switch FB has and there is nothing related to that. I even ended up with a public profile and tested for a few weeks posting like that instead of “friends only” with the hopes something would happen, but no. Then came Google, of course, I’ve run hundreds of searches regarding this and while it seems there are more people looking to actually turn this feature off, I found there are also a lot of people having this kind of issue.
My next step was to get help from FB, and this is where it gets worse. You ran a search for the problem and you get some results that are not what you are looking for. You dig a little more and you can find comments from people asking the same but no answers. I did submit several support requests, and they all get closed with the same response.
I mean ok, you don’t have to update me individually, but if there are thousands of people being affected by this, you should either fix it, or at least say “We know it happens, but we won’t fix or don’t know how to fix”. I’ve given up trying to get a hold of someone at FB, I’ve tried everything a lot of times, I am not only a guy adding old friends to FB, I am also a paying customer because of ads I run in pages, via Instagram too.
Funny enough the page that shows recommendations started to work yesterday. I added 2 people, and today got notifications that they accepted. Guess what… yes… that page is gone again.
I really have never had any kind of other “real” issue with FB, but it strikes me that when requesting help with a feature that is part of their core system, you get zero. How is the support with real issues, such as removing an impersonator, when your account gets hacked or when there is hate speech from accounts, porn in feeds, etc?
If by any chance this is happening to you, or you are concerned about this issue, share this small read. Maybe, maybe one day someone at FB will tell me why.
