enigma_x

Hi. Thanks for doing this AMA. I'm a student of Computer Science and my area of research is Machine Intelligence -- so social media mining is a vital part of my area of interest. I've been following your research and what you've done and are doing is fascinating to me.

I have a hypothesis that our likes, preferences and online interactions do not just tell the researchers about our character traits and how we perceive things, but they dictate our future interactions as well. For instance, take the Facebook news feed. We tend to see more and more of activities of people whom we interact with and less of those we did not interact with. This means that we are not interacting with those people more because of our relationship but because we interacted with them in the past. The more you see of someone's activities the more you interact with them and thereby the algorithm forces you to strengthen the relationship with that person by showing more of that person's activities. This has had both positive and negative effects -- where people have actually formed closer relationships and ones where people don't want to see activities of these people anymore so they altogether remove them from their 'friend-list'.

• What do you think of this sort of extreme categorisation of relationships where you cannot choose to control the closeness of a person but the online social interaction does it for you.

• Where is this heading towards?

• Is this a focus of your research as well? If yes, what possible good can happen as a result of this?

On a lighter note - Have you watched Person of Interest? What is your opinion on that? I as a CS student believe something close to that can be built in practice perhaps not over the entire city but by monitoring everything that someone who was previously arrested/accused does. People who have committed a crime are more likely to commit a similar crime a second time around, so how far do you think are we from 'predicting' crimes in advance and solving them before they even happen?

What good aspects of a better internet experience are the people who do not use Facebook/Twitter or other social media missing out on? (Apart from the obvious purposes of the said websites)