How to make your Facebook awesome

In 2013 Facebook hired Yann LeCun, the inventor of convolutional neural networks (at Bell Labs in 1988). Such neural networks recently won the ImageNet Competition. Basically the guy is awesome and he’s been at making FB less dull since 2013.

So whilst LeCun is busy making your timeline more relevant to you, here’s how you can train his algorithm:

• Subscribe to stuff which is of interest to you. For example: BBC news, Guardian and Financial Times regularly post something of interest.

• Find people that are awesome and follow them. Awesome people share thought-provoking posts, write interesting blog posts and express their informative options often backing them up with reasoning. And their arguments are not some kind of sarcastic remarks of cosmic stupidity. Start by following just one awesome person and then you’ll see them interacting with others. Follow those others too.

• Find societies where awesome people hang out and join those groups.

• Hide stuff which is uninteresting, mundane and dull.

And now my Facebook is awesome. No, Mark Zuckerberg, you got it all wrong. And Twitter got it all right: I don’t actually care all that much about people whose trace in space-time crossed mine. Just because I went to school with someone I have no interest in how hard that someone partied last night. I need food for thought and thus I prefer to follow people who share my interests, not my geo location.

Now why don’t I just use Twitter, you may ask. Because the idea of 140 characters is putting me off - I might one day overcome this barrier, but not yet. It’s because of you, Twitter, people share text as screenshots and that is just horrible. Die, 140 limit, die, die, die!

Isn’t it all just creating a bubble? Yes it is. However, the people I follow are quite contrarian even amongst themselves. Critical thinking applied to critical thinking. And not for the sake of it, for the sake of trying to be right.