LUC News Investigates: "For Sale" Facebook Notifications

If you haven’t noticed the recent onslaught of Facebook notifications in “For Sale” sites, you must be living under a rock ― or currently sitting on a remote island sipping cocktails through a straw from a coconut. For the rest of us, the change has been extremely noticeable:

“I woke up one day and had 27 notifications. I said to myself ‘I made it! I’m finally popular!’― But no―It was just third years trying to sell their shit last minute.” told us a second year, who was in the middle of registering for a penpal website.

And she was not far off because experts have scientifically proven a number of things. Firstly, the number of “For Sale” notifications one received are not correlated with one’s popularity (p=0.98). Secondly, there is actually a negative relationship between the number of notifications you receive and your interest in them (p=0.01). And thirdly, “people who choose to ignore group conversations only make it harder for everyone,” (Van Gijn et al. 2016, 69).

After interviewing almost half of LUC (n=276) ―if you weren’t part of this sample you must not be in the study area often enough― we realised that the number of people wanting to buy things in these groups was also close to zero.

“I don’t care about 98% of these people, I don’t even know half of them!”, admitted a disgruntled first year before locking his AvB room and leaving on a trip to Thailand.

Despite the overwhelming lack of interest, LUC News did find one student who would have liked to buy furniture, but couldn’t:

“I wish I could buy some of these things, but I went home as soon as I was done on Tuesday of Reading Week,” the first year told us via Skype. “I just leave as soon as possible, I kinda hate the Netherlands,” he said as he signed off by flashing a middle finger.

So there you have it, LUC News once more investigated a story you truly cared about. Are you annoyed by all the notifications? Are you posting things yourself and are you struggling to sell it? Share your stories in the comments! ...or don’t...

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