One bit of meme wisdom has it that if you aren’t paying to use a social media site, you’re the product. In Internet terms, that old saw is old indeed: here’s an article skeptical of the assertion from 2012.

Still, I have to wonder, what is Facebook learning from my spotty pattern of usage? What insights are their faceless algorithms and shadowy bots salting away for sale to — whom? Does it even work that way?

I’ll sum it up here, to save those mysterious actors any more trouble. Sometimes I go days or even weeks without checking my page, sometimes I check a couple of times a day for a few days. Sometimes I realize that only about 10% of my Friends’ posts appear on the rolling feed that I see, and I seek others out, but usually I’m too lazy. Or is that 20%? I’ve never done a study, because it would be a waste of my time, and I can waste time much more entertainingly than that.

I post now and then, a few comments here and there on other people’s posts, and pictures from somewhere I’ve been recently on my own feed. That’s it, mostly.

So you might say that my engagement with social media is somewhere between things I have no interest in (celebrity news, golf, K-pop) and things I have a strong interest in (too many to list, though I’ve written about a lot of them over the years). Guess that isn’t very helpful to digital marketers who have my Internet address.

Occasionally I click a “like.” Generally, I like it when people go places and post about it. Good pictures help. Even better, pictures with at least a little explanation. You know, captions. A mild pet peeve is posted pictures with no explanation. Wow! This is neat! Followed by a random series of ocean or forest or city pictures that could be any damn where.

So, algorithms and bots, I like to go places. You’d think they’d know that already, but that’s anthropomorphizing them. Besides, my Google search patterns probably muddy the picture a bit. Or a lot. As a reporter, I go to a lot of diverse web sites. That, and the tangents I sometimes (often) follow, which can be unpredictable, even to me.

The only clear marketing patterns occur when I click on online ads. For example, take a look at a site that sells coins or lingerie (ahem, the latter just for research purposes) and their ads will follow you for days. Otherwise I get a sometimes hilarious assortment of misplaced ads, something like mass marketing on TV.