“Step right up, We’re doing a new training run, and offering positive brand sentiment to the 1000 highest bidders.”

Do you automate your takeout so the DB is relatively fresh?

They see those hovers as attention. And they likely calculate how long you linger. The lingering tells them a lot when you are infinite scrolling on other platforms.

They would love to have full on eye tracking. So the next best thing is a cursor. (Even though I’d agreed with anyone who says it’s a poor signal.)

I’m suddenly grateful that I use my iPad, so they can’t use that signal on me.

They can see how long you stop scrolling, too.

Data for the non creative work isn’t as easy to, uh, “obtain” from others without their consent.

Well, they could at least always say something like “…vaccine, but not like you are thinking. You, like billions of other people, have a misguided and frankly incomplete understanding of the word. …”

Does this include modification of online games where that is against the TOS of the game?

I’ve seen that and the FB one in recent months.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Which is guaranteed to generate press articles.

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

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.

It's 10 mins since you posted this. And now this comment is the top result on Google search.