![]() He frequently posted long, personal updates about his job, girlfriend, and family, which I happily consumed. For years before I unfollowed him, Joe was a constant, passive figure in my life, at least on Facebook, even though we had never been close. When I saw Joe’s profile picture displayed on the feature, I realized I had forgotten about him entirely. Unfollowing, I would argue, is one of the great pleasures left on the internet. I started using Facebook’s unfollow feature a couple of years ago, but never extensively until now. It even arranges profiles by how many times their posts show up, meaning you can axe the most prolific posters first if you want to. In fact, Facebook has a tool that lets you easily unfollow people and Pages in your News Feed. It took about a minute of profile-picture stalking to register that I knew the poster from a Spanish class I took in high school. The other day an acquaintance shared a racist story about the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict into my News Feed. So my final step was to prune my News Feed of my past. "Facebook increases my awareness of them and their views."īut knowing about my high school friends’ views is often what makes my Facebook experience miserable. "Without Facebook I wouldn't hear from my high school friends very much," Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, said in an interview with Axios last year. Blocking them cleared out room in my News Feed for news sources, funny meme pages, and even some posts from actual friends. ![]() For months, I've been haunted by companies like Everlane and Glossier, which ostensibly target the same young, female-identifying, urban-dwelling people over and over again. I was shocked at how many ads-especially for the same companies-had actually populated my News Feed. Predictably, clearing my News Feed of ads made for a much better experience. Social Fixer did help improve my News Feed somewhat, but what really made the difference was another Chrome extension: AdBlock Plus. ![]() A manicured but entirely predictable News Feed may be just as bad as one that feels out of control. Ultimately, I declined to use very many of them. Using Social Fixer's filters is difficult if you don't know what's bothering you, or what you want more of, before actually seeing it. This is what makes Social Fixer hard: I’m not sure I-or most people on Facebook-know exactly what they will spend time looking at online given the chance. Which means Facebook kept feeding them to me. I didn’t really enjoy watching the videos when I thought about it, but I spent a lot of time consuming them anyway. I found myself intoxicated by strange cooking videos and cute animal clips. For example, when Facebook started prioritizing video content last year, my News Feed filled up with viral videos from brands and publishers. Social Fixer’s filters work great, but it’s hard to know exactly what you don’t want to see. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |