It's because they originally built their recommendation system to recommend friends and their content. Here, the social graph makes complete sense as the foundation for their simple search algorithm.
But as they expanded their recommendation capabilities, the features stuck around. It's the same reason why tech debt accumulates. Data sticks around in the same way code does. But data is even higher friction, since it's a superset of the code.
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That's a crazy design choice by meta if true. The interests of those in my social graph have very little connection to my interests.
It's because they originally built their recommendation system to recommend friends and their content. Here, the social graph makes complete sense as the foundation for their simple search algorithm. But as they expanded their recommendation capabilities, the features stuck around. It's the same reason why tech debt accumulates. Data sticks around in the same way code does. But data is even higher friction, since it's a superset of the code.