We noticed recently that people didn't like it when Facebook "experimented" with their news feed. Even the FTC is getting involved. But guess what, everybody: if you use the Internet, you're the subject of hundreds of experiments at any given time, on every site. That's how websites work.

Because the way love works in general, you don't need everybody to like you somewhat - you need one person to like you a lot.

You take a picture of yourself in some exceptional situation - skydiving or whatever. People always post those photos because it works - you're saying something about yourself that begs a conversation and that's what the users are there for.

Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, Instagram, all these companies are businesses first, but, as a close second, they're demographers of unprecedented reach, thoroughness, and importance. Practically as an accident, digital data can now show us how we fight, how we love, how we age, who we are, and how we're changing. All we have to do is look.

To be universally liked is to be relatively ignored.

Dudes have been making up stuff about themselves probably since there have been dudes.

Going to a site with more users seems obviously better to me, but at the same time, having a bland, middle of the road profile with bland, middle of the road pictures seems like a bad strategy to me.