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Does anyone know if there is an equivalent to delete Facebook friends or unlike pages/leave groups? I really want to clean out my Facebook since I've had it for

Does anyone know if there is an equivalent to delete Facebook friends or unlike pages/leave groups? I really want to clean out my Facebook since I've had it for a very long time and much of it doesn't appeal to me anymore, but I don't necessarily want to lose the tiny social ecosystem I've created with my family. However, I would like to remove the hundreds of friends and pages that I don't talk to/don't represent me/are mining my data even more than the platform is.

j-c-hewitt 7y ago
I am in the same boat. It should be a lot easier to scrub your FB with the default tools.
- nostalgk 7y ago
  Agreed. Currently, the only way seems to be to go to each page and click the button.
celestialcheese 7y ago
I did it a while back (3 or so years ago) by scrolling through the dialog so that all of my "friends" were loaded, and then opened up the browser console and wrote a line of JS to toggle the checkbox to delete each of them and saved. Not sure if that's still the interface today, but it worked for me back then. * Edit: I checked, and you can still do this. It's under the main preferences dropdown -> News Feed Preferences -> Unfollow people and groups to hide their posts It's no longer a checbox, but you can simulate a click in JS. Haven't tested so obviously YMMV
sdrinf 7y ago
I did this a year ago, and it considerably improved my Fb feed’s signal/noise ratio. Specific procedure I’d recommend is to make this a regular process: open fb feed, read until you find a thing which does not improves your life, click on owner (author / group) -click “friend” -> unfollow. Iterate until sanity is restored. And one moral of this story (hi Facebook, please understand this) is that people are multidimensional. Just because you know someone once, in one context in real life, does not, actually, imply positive relationship on informational ecologies for all time in the future. “Authentic self” as defined by Facebook as a single coherent identity is a lie.
- donatj 7y ago
  Maybe I'm too forgiving but I'll generally just snooze a person unless they're genuinely consistently horrible. People change. I had friends who would post tireless political rants that just post memes now.
  - nostalgk 7y ago
    My experience is that I have hundreds of people to snooze, and would rather just have a fresh start and let those people trickle back in if they want to. Maybe I should just make a new account.
    - amerkhalid 7y ago
      I did that last year, created a new account. Added back only a few real friends. But slowly started getting requests from many of the previous friends. Some thought I had unfriended them, so had to explain to them that it was a new account. Felt obligated to add back most of the people. Now my feed is useless again. Perhaps this should be yearly ritual.
      - helloindia 7y ago
        Things to remember when you create a new account: 1. an alias for profile name rather than real name 2. don't put your picture in your profile This way, you can add people you want to, and you'll not get requests from people you're hiding from.
- OJFord 7y ago
  That process is what made me stop logging in (haven't actually logged back in to delete, it's been two years - stopped when I stopped needing it for university groups). There was just nothing, or so little, that 'improves my life' as you put it, nor anything close. Just shit and drivel. And it's not made for it. Quality doesn't equal traffic, nor even engagement in a monetisable sense. If it were, it would very quickly have learned that I didn't want to see memes, full stop. Nope, feed continued to be full of valueless memes. For a brief period I considered I might be 'missing out', but it doesn't take long to realise that if you're missing out through not being on the right social media platform... who or what exactly are you missing out on.
RandallBrown 7y ago
Facebook's algorithm should mostly do this by default. If you don't interact with people's posts, you'll see less of them. You can explicitly mute people as well or even just certain websites. My aunt has been posting a ton of weird alt-right news lately and I've had pretty good success by just blocking her news sources so I can still see posts from her that I care about (family stuff.) I also have a few friends who I've muted entirely because I still want to be able to contact them, but I really don't care about any of the stuff they're posting to facebook. This might be a little more manual than you want, but it's pretty simple to just casually block posts you don't like as you scroll through your feed.
- nostalgk 7y ago
  It's not really a matter of scrolling and seeing their content so much as that there are people I'd just rather not be associated with. I've been contacted numerous times about people committing crimes or getting involved with radical political spectrums, and I'd rather just disassociate myself from a lot of the people I used to see or used to have relationships with but do no longer (these number in the hundreds, from a lot of other social platforms). I also don't really scroll the feed anymore, so I'd rather just keep it to people I want to keep tabs on (close family, professional contacts)
mullingitover 7y ago
I used this to unfollow everyone and everything: https://gist.github.com/renestalder/c5b77635bfbec8f94d28 https://gist.github.com/renestalder/c5b77635bfbec8f94d28 Then I added back the few that were actually important. Huge quality of life improvement.
Canadauni 7y ago
It takes a while but what I ended up doing was deleting friends on their birthdays. It takes at least a year but mostly weeds people out who don't fit in your circle.
- onychomys 7y ago
  I don't have my birthday listed there (because I find the constant birthday posts from friends to be annoying), so I'm functionally immortal under this scheme!
- wolco 7y ago
  That's a little cold. Remember the circle turns.
oli5679 7y ago
You could easily write a Selenium bot that unfriends/ unsubscribes from all except a whitelist.

j-c-hewitt 7y ago

I am in the same boat. It should be a lot easier to scrub your FB with the default tools.

nostalgk 7y ago
Agreed. Currently, the only way seems to be to go to each page and click the button.

celestialcheese 7y ago

I did it a while back (3 or so years ago) by scrolling through the dialog so that all of my "friends" were loaded, and then opened up the browser console and wrote a line of JS to toggle the checkbox to delete each of them and saved. Not sure if that's still the interface today, but it worked for me back then. * Edit: I checked, and you can still do this. It's under the main preferences dropdown -> News Feed Preferences -> Unfollow people and groups to hide their posts It's no longer a checbox, but you can simulate a click in JS. Haven't tested so obviously YMMV

sdrinf 7y ago

I did this a year ago, and it considerably improved my Fb feed’s signal/noise ratio. Specific procedure I’d recommend is to make this a regular process: open fb feed, read until you find a thing which does not improves your life, click on owner (author / group) -click “friend” -> unfollow. Iterate until sanity is restored. And one moral of this story (hi Facebook, please understand this) is that people are multidimensional. Just because you know someone once, in one context in real life, does not, actually, imply positive relationship on informational ecologies for all time in the future. “Authentic self” as defined by Facebook as a single coherent identity is a lie.

donatj 7y ago
Maybe I'm too forgiving but I'll generally just snooze a person unless they're genuinely consistently horrible. People change. I had friends who would post tireless political rants that just post memes now.
- nostalgk 7y ago
  My experience is that I have hundreds of people to snooze, and would rather just have a fresh start and let those people trickle back in if they want to. Maybe I should just make a new account.
  - amerkhalid 7y ago
    I did that last year, created a new account. Added back only a few real friends. But slowly started getting requests from many of the previous friends. Some thought I had unfriended them, so had to explain to them that it was a new account. Felt obligated to add back most of the people. Now my feed is useless again. Perhaps this should be yearly ritual.
    - helloindia 7y ago
      Things to remember when you create a new account: 1. an alias for profile name rather than real name 2. don't put your picture in your profile This way, you can add people you want to, and you'll not get requests from people you're hiding from.
OJFord 7y ago
That process is what made me stop logging in (haven't actually logged back in to delete, it's been two years - stopped when I stopped needing it for university groups). There was just nothing, or so little, that 'improves my life' as you put it, nor anything close. Just shit and drivel. And it's not made for it. Quality doesn't equal traffic, nor even engagement in a monetisable sense. If it were, it would very quickly have learned that I didn't want to see memes, full stop. Nope, feed continued to be full of valueless memes. For a brief period I considered I might be 'missing out', but it doesn't take long to realise that if you're missing out through not being on the right social media platform... who or what exactly are you missing out on.

RandallBrown 7y ago

Facebook's algorithm should mostly do this by default. If you don't interact with people's posts, you'll see less of them. You can explicitly mute people as well or even just certain websites. My aunt has been posting a ton of weird alt-right news lately and I've had pretty good success by just blocking her news sources so I can still see posts from her that I care about (family stuff.) I also have a few friends who I've muted entirely because I still want to be able to contact them, but I really don't care about any of the stuff they're posting to facebook. This might be a little more manual than you want, but it's pretty simple to just casually block posts you don't like as you scroll through your feed.

nostalgk 7y ago
It's not really a matter of scrolling and seeing their content so much as that there are people I'd just rather not be associated with. I've been contacted numerous times about people committing crimes or getting involved with radical political spectrums, and I'd rather just disassociate myself from a lot of the people I used to see or used to have relationships with but do no longer (these number in the hundreds, from a lot of other social platforms). I also don't really scroll the feed anymore, so I'd rather just keep it to people I want to keep tabs on (close family, professional contacts)

mullingitover 7y ago

I used this to unfollow everyone and everything: https://gist.github.com/renestalder/c5b77635bfbec8f94d28 https://gist.github.com/renestalder/c5b77635bfbec8f94d28 Then I added back the few that were actually important. Huge quality of life improvement.

Canadauni 7y ago

It takes a while but what I ended up doing was deleting friends on their birthdays. It takes at least a year but mostly weeds people out who don't fit in your circle.

onychomys 7y ago
I don't have my birthday listed there (because I find the constant birthday posts from friends to be annoying), so I'm functionally immortal under this scheme!
wolco 7y ago
That's a little cold. Remember the circle turns.

oli5679 7y ago

You could easily write a Selenium bot that unfriends/ unsubscribes from all except a whitelist.