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I manually unfollowed almost every friend and every page I followed a couple years ago. My feed is now a very limited selection of gaming and media posts that I

I manually unfollowed almost every friend and every page I followed a couple years ago. My feed is now a very limited selection of gaming and media posts that I enjoy immensely. No politics at all and almost nothing in my feed from actual individuals that I know. I ended up enjoying Facebook again, even if in a very different way. It was a tedious process and a tool like this could help a lot of people find their own value in the platform by getting a fresh start. Sadly, FB has no interest in that and would rather corral us in ways as to maximize their own benefit, not ours.

majani 5y ago
I did the same thing a few years ago, but my usage of FB dropped off a cliff after I cleaned up my feed. I am no longer even a daily active user. I can see why they want it to be an endless quagmire of mental junk. There's definitely a correlation between that and time spent on the site
cronix 5y ago
> has no interest in that and would rather corral us in ways as to maximize their own benefit, not ours. I'm trying to think of a for-profit business that does not do that and coming up short.
- standardUser 5y ago
  There's lots of ways to make a profit and some companies have found ways to make user choice and transparency key selling points that endear their customers and keep them coming back. Or at least show some restraint and not engage wholesale in dark patterns, even if only for reputational purposes. Look at GoDaddy, a near-universally despised company that has managed to become a dominant player by engaging in anti-user practices. But there's plenty of other players that profit in that same space while maintaining really positive relationships with their customers. So while I'm sympathetic to the viewpoint that for-profit businesses always and only act like for-profit businesses, there's still some room to maneuver. Facebook has clearly chosen to manipulate and data mine every single user to within inches of their lives in what amounts to a scorched earth policy.
jessaustin 5y ago
Their business model is based on doomscrolling.
javajosh 5y ago
Good anecdote! In fact, I don't see why FB is doing this at all, as it seems to be against their self-interest. Heck, it never occurred to me to unfollow everyone; it may make the platform bearable/usable. (I went on a "brief" fb pause over a year ago. Just never had a reason to go back, except to say hi to friends that I don't have other channels to. But the cost/benefit doesn't really work out. Unfollow Everything would change that calculation for me.)
ViViDboarder 5y ago
I use RSS to follow media posts rather than people.
prepend 5y ago
I did something similar and I probably open every few weeks or so and it’s great. It would be nice if I could easily switch between networks but I have to keep the same pared down list of people and things I follow. It reminds me of Google circles where you could have more fine grained networks.
ok123456 5y ago
There's no getting away from politics if you live in somewhat of a swing state. My feed is full of AIPAC, conservative think-tank, and posts by the local guy who just doesn't want his property taxes on his $3 million dollar estate to go up $200/year. All of them paid for. All of them have no way of "unfollowing". There is nothing in my follows or "likes" that would indicate that this is anything I'd be interested in. It's just as bad as the broadcast TV ads that they "disrupted:" indiscriminate, obtrusive and unwanted.
- walrus01 5y ago
  It's tedious but it is possible to click on the context menu next to an ad, then click "why am I seeing this ad", and then click "never show ads from this source again". Now that I think of it, a client side extension that automates this process, would be an interesting thing. Generally the same idea as the extension mentioned in the top post, which automates the client-side of unfollowing everything, but for attempting to 'block' ads from everything. I wonder if they've rate limited that...
  - thinkloop 5y ago
    Couldn't you go a step further and have the extension look for "sponsored" list items and simply remove them from the html?
    - wheels 5y ago
      F.B. Purity does just that, but the HTML is fairly complicated (if I remember correctly, the relevant words are a jumble of absolutely positioned spans, with a lot of fodder thrown in to throw off blockers). Facebook changed their code about a month ago, and the extension developer has been working on a fix for almost all of that time and still hasn't rolled it out yet.
    - colejohnson66 5y ago
      Ad blockers such as uBlock Origin try. IIRC, Facebook obscures the HTML in a way that makes blocking without a more advanced parser harder.
thomascgalvin 5y ago
> I manually unfollowed almost every friend and every page I followed a couple years ago. I did much the same. I unfollowed every page, and any person I hadn't seen in person within the past year. My Facebook is now a carefully curated list of people I like, and cat pictures. It's done wonders for my mental health.
- trident5000 5y ago
  Thats great for you and others should give this a try. However, its unfortunate that if everyone did do this facebook would simply force an undo of that action...removing the unfollow feature and subscribing everyone again or whatever it may be.
  - thomascgalvin 5y ago
    Facebook wants you engaged; they don't give a shit what you're engaged with. If me chuckling about a derpy kitten lets them throw ads at my eyeballs, they're all for it.
decodebytes 5y ago
Is this the same as unfriending?
- standardUser 5y ago
  No, you can mute any friend (or any page) without them knowing, but I think the term they use is unfollow.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> I manually unfollowed almost every friend and every page I followed a couple years ago. ... I ended up enjoying Facebook again, even if in a very different way. Facebook and other social media platforms actually gives users a lot of tools to tailor their feeds. Muting or unfollowing people (leaving the friend connection intact) should be the go-to operation for anyone who's always posting things you aren't interested in. The other half of tailoring your feed is learning to embrace the like button. If you see something you like, click the like button. Sounds simple, but I know a lot of people who refuse to click the like button because they dislike the concept of like counts, but they forget that it's one of the primary mechanisms for telling the algorithms what you want to see. The more you like content, the more you'll see it.
- tmp_anon_22 5y ago
  Do they provide bulk tooling or automation APIs to do it effectively?
- ohashi 5y ago
  I feel like they also are trying to send me content that upsets me to get me to engage. Mute one conspiracy theorist and all the others start getting moved up in my feed.
  - colejohnson66 5y ago
    Well, you “engaged” with the muted piece by interacting with it (even if it’s to mute it), so you must be interested in that content, no? /s
    - denton-scratch 5y ago
      Why the /s? Declaring that you dislike something is engagement, as much as declaring that you like it. No way will I ever engage with like/dislike buttons. My preference is that organisations like Faceache should never learn that I even exist. I don't have a problem with ranking my feed, by the way; I don't have a feed. I've never had a Faceache account, and that fact causes me zero grief.
chias 5y ago
I quit facebook for a couple years, but recently reactivated because the truth of the matter was that my family uses it and I missed finding out about so many things, including some marriages and births. When I reactivated, I set out to do exactly that: every time I look at my feed, I unfollow everybody who is not immediate family. It has been tedious and slow-going, but the net result has been actually pretty great. One thing I struggle with is the tags. You unfollow someone and your feed won't include their posts anymore, but it _will_ include random posts that they're tagged in, and I haven't yet found a way to curtail this. I've used "Hide this post" repeatedly because the option text says "see fewer posts like this", but it hasn't really had an effect. Have you found a way to fix this?
- 3520 5y ago
  You may be able to configure F.B. Purity [0] to your liking. I installed it last night after seeing it mentioned in another thread here and it's cut down on all of my newsfeed clutter. [0]https://www.fbpurity.com/ https://www.fbpurity.com/
- sanjayparekh 5y ago
  I did a Show HN a little while ago but you might want to check out TogetherLetters [0]. We made it to keep going with regular updates for groups of people (friends, family, coworkers, etc.) via email. Never shared on the web and it's consistent (bi-weekly, monthly, and quarterly in the free plan, weekly added in the paid plan). It might help solve some of your FOMO pain. [0] https://www.togetherletters.com https://www.togetherletters.com
  - chias 5y ago
    That looks like a wonderful project! Unfortunately, in my situation, my family is so deeply steeped in Facebook that I have no choice. We already have group chats and the like, and some stuff gets posted there, especially if someone wants me in particular to know something. But if you try to go down that road, you're only going to get the newsworthy headlines: your grandma died, Matt had a kid, etc. But in a lot of cases, people just want to shout little things at the world, and when my family does that, it's on Facebook. It's unreasonable to expect everyone I care about to announce everything twice, once to everyone and a second time to just me, so I knew I was going to miss some things. But recently it came to my attention just how much I was missing, and it's just not worth it. You only get your family once. Keeping up with the little things means getting back on Facebook, so I'm back on Facebook.
prescriptivist 5y ago
I did this too and use facebook for the marketplace and half a dozen pretty active niche groups that don't have corresponding communities outside of facebook. I agree that it was tedious but since doing that I can't muster much ire toward Facebook beyond the general ire I have for everything on the internet, which I think has been a net negative for people's happiness (broadly speaking).
qudat 5y ago
It sounds like you turned facebook into twitter. Just use twitter.
- Zak 5y ago
  Facebook is valuable to me if the people I want to hear from post content there, not because of its UX.
cyberpsybin 5y ago
I did the same. Spent a month blocking, unfollowing any political page that might appear. Blocked all people who post political content and now the feed is so clean for last 2 years. Another key thing is to simply not install FB on phone. Only use it once a day when on desktop. Such a nice tool to connect with old friends otherwise.
jsemrau 5y ago
Everytime I read posts like these it makes me wonder how much of this is really the truth? The notion of you-are-not-enjoying-fb-because-you-are-doing-it-wrong is regularly popping up on those discussions threads and it really feels like orchestrated corp-speak.
soylentnewsorg 5y ago
This is the big takeaway here. Companies thinking they are a monopoly, crippling their product to extract maximum short-term value (the MBA doctrine), and destroy the business long-term, because they now have an inferior product. Less and less people are using facebook. Most (worldwide) never did in the first place. But an ugly man compensates for insecurity about his physical appearance by pretending he has more power than he does, despite him in reality having plenty of power to feel secure. Facebook: you want to do something in an automated way? Enjoy your two day clickfest. Real life: yeah, I'm going to just use something else, and people coming of age will laugh about this legacy antiquated service. Do you know how you get a fresh start without this process you found tedious? Put in a bunch of fake info into your profile, then just leave the account alone, forever. Then go somewhere else. Facebook has a large userbase. If you're not there for the other users, why in the world would you not use one of the hundred other similar services? Now, as far as my personal opinion: facebook should lose the lawsuit. This extension is a script run by the user. There might be something that says the user has to click and can't run scripts, that the user agreed to. Facebook then has a case, against the user, and should start suing their users. Facebook has no standing against the people who wrote the script, but are not running it against facebook servers. I am free to write any piece of code, that does anything, as long as I don't have a contract with Facebook saying I won't. This is called freedom of speech, and a government does not have authority to make me stop. And a private company has no enforcement authority, because they're a company, not a government.
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  > Less and less people are using facebook. So I hear. This is the trajectory of all social-media sites; they cease to be fashionable and hip, as their early users (late teens to early 20s) move on. What remains is then children, old fuddy-duddies, politicos and advertisers. So they become even less fashionable and less hip. Consider Myspace. What surprises me is that Faceache has lasted so long. If I were into gambling on stocks, I'd be shorting Faceache.
smsm42 5y ago
You can clean up the FB feed. I've been doing it for years when I used it. FB purity plus adblockers plus ruthless unfollowing builds you a pretty clean feed after a while. But one day you realize - or at least I did - that no matter what, every time you go there, every time you click on any link, every time you read and react, every time you post - you contribute to it, and with it you strengthen the company's position and their chokehold on public discussion space, and their dominant position in the business of connecting people. No matter what you do, if you do it there, it's to their benefit. I kinda admire the genius of it, but you have other options. If you don't like what FB as a company is doing, the only way to resist it is not to play. So eventually I abandoned my carefully constructed feed and went to look for better pastures.
raindropm 5y ago
I did that too, seperate 'friends' and 'interest' account and never make it overlap, ever, and occasionally 'pruning' who you follow. I somehow enjoy what I used to hate again. It's powerful tool. Sadly, I think very few people use it this way, billions of people use it as all-in-one hub, and that leads to disaster we see nowadays.

majani 5y ago

I did the same thing a few years ago, but my usage of FB dropped off a cliff after I cleaned up my feed. I am no longer even a daily active user. I can see why they want it to be an endless quagmire of mental junk. There's definitely a correlation between that and time spent on the site

cronix 5y ago

> has no interest in that and would rather corral us in ways as to maximize their own benefit, not ours. I'm trying to think of a for-profit business that does not do that and coming up short.

standardUser 5y ago
There's lots of ways to make a profit and some companies have found ways to make user choice and transparency key selling points that endear their customers and keep them coming back. Or at least show some restraint and not engage wholesale in dark patterns, even if only for reputational purposes. Look at GoDaddy, a near-universally despised company that has managed to become a dominant player by engaging in anti-user practices. But there's plenty of other players that profit in that same space while maintaining really positive relationships with their customers. So while I'm sympathetic to the viewpoint that for-profit businesses always and only act like for-profit businesses, there's still some room to maneuver. Facebook has clearly chosen to manipulate and data mine every single user to within inches of their lives in what amounts to a scorched earth policy.

jessaustin 5y ago

Their business model is based on doomscrolling.

javajosh 5y ago

Good anecdote! In fact, I don't see why FB is doing this at all, as it seems to be against their self-interest. Heck, it never occurred to me to unfollow everyone; it may make the platform bearable/usable. (I went on a "brief" fb pause over a year ago. Just never had a reason to go back, except to say hi to friends that I don't have other channels to. But the cost/benefit doesn't really work out. Unfollow Everything would change that calculation for me.)

ViViDboarder 5y ago

I use RSS to follow media posts rather than people.

prepend 5y ago

I did something similar and I probably open every few weeks or so and it’s great. It would be nice if I could easily switch between networks but I have to keep the same pared down list of people and things I follow. It reminds me of Google circles where you could have more fine grained networks.

ok123456 5y ago

There's no getting away from politics if you live in somewhat of a swing state. My feed is full of AIPAC, conservative think-tank, and posts by the local guy who just doesn't want his property taxes on his $3 million dollar estate to go up $200/year. All of them paid for. All of them have no way of "unfollowing". There is nothing in my follows or "likes" that would indicate that this is anything I'd be interested in. It's just as bad as the broadcast TV ads that they "disrupted:" indiscriminate, obtrusive and unwanted.

walrus01 5y ago
It's tedious but it is possible to click on the context menu next to an ad, then click "why am I seeing this ad", and then click "never show ads from this source again". Now that I think of it, a client side extension that automates this process, would be an interesting thing. Generally the same idea as the extension mentioned in the top post, which automates the client-side of unfollowing everything, but for attempting to 'block' ads from everything. I wonder if they've rate limited that...
- thinkloop 5y ago
  Couldn't you go a step further and have the extension look for "sponsored" list items and simply remove them from the html?
  - wheels 5y ago
    F.B. Purity does just that, but the HTML is fairly complicated (if I remember correctly, the relevant words are a jumble of absolutely positioned spans, with a lot of fodder thrown in to throw off blockers). Facebook changed their code about a month ago, and the extension developer has been working on a fix for almost all of that time and still hasn't rolled it out yet.
  - colejohnson66 5y ago
    Ad blockers such as uBlock Origin try. IIRC, Facebook obscures the HTML in a way that makes blocking without a more advanced parser harder.

thomascgalvin 5y ago

> I manually unfollowed almost every friend and every page I followed a couple years ago. I did much the same. I unfollowed every page, and any person I hadn't seen in person within the past year. My Facebook is now a carefully curated list of people I like, and cat pictures. It's done wonders for my mental health.

trident5000 5y ago
Thats great for you and others should give this a try. However, its unfortunate that if everyone did do this facebook would simply force an undo of that action...removing the unfollow feature and subscribing everyone again or whatever it may be.
- thomascgalvin 5y ago
  Facebook wants you engaged; they don't give a shit what you're engaged with. If me chuckling about a derpy kitten lets them throw ads at my eyeballs, they're all for it.

decodebytes 5y ago

Is this the same as unfriending?

standardUser 5y ago
No, you can mute any friend (or any page) without them knowing, but I think the term they use is unfollow.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

> I manually unfollowed almost every friend and every page I followed a couple years ago. ... I ended up enjoying Facebook again, even if in a very different way. Facebook and other social media platforms actually gives users a lot of tools to tailor their feeds. Muting or unfollowing people (leaving the friend connection intact) should be the go-to operation for anyone who's always posting things you aren't interested in. The other half of tailoring your feed is learning to embrace the like button. If you see something you like, click the like button. Sounds simple, but I know a lot of people who refuse to click the like button because they dislike the concept of like counts, but they forget that it's one of the primary mechanisms for telling the algorithms what you want to see. The more you like content, the more you'll see it.

tmp_anon_22 5y ago
Do they provide bulk tooling or automation APIs to do it effectively?
ohashi 5y ago
I feel like they also are trying to send me content that upsets me to get me to engage. Mute one conspiracy theorist and all the others start getting moved up in my feed.
- colejohnson66 5y ago
  Well, you “engaged” with the muted piece by interacting with it (even if it’s to mute it), so you must be interested in that content, no? /s
  - denton-scratch 5y ago
    Why the /s? Declaring that you dislike something is engagement, as much as declaring that you like it. No way will I ever engage with like/dislike buttons. My preference is that organisations like Faceache should never learn that I even exist. I don't have a problem with ranking my feed, by the way; I don't have a feed. I've never had a Faceache account, and that fact causes me zero grief.

chias 5y ago

I quit facebook for a couple years, but recently reactivated because the truth of the matter was that my family uses it and I missed finding out about so many things, including some marriages and births. When I reactivated, I set out to do exactly that: every time I look at my feed, I unfollow everybody who is not immediate family. It has been tedious and slow-going, but the net result has been actually pretty great. One thing I struggle with is the tags. You unfollow someone and your feed won't include their posts anymore, but it _will_ include random posts that they're tagged in, and I haven't yet found a way to curtail this. I've used "Hide this post" repeatedly because the option text says "see fewer posts like this", but it hasn't really had an effect. Have you found a way to fix this?

3520 5y ago
You may be able to configure F.B. Purity [0] to your liking. I installed it last night after seeing it mentioned in another thread here and it's cut down on all of my newsfeed clutter. [0]https://www.fbpurity.com/ https://www.fbpurity.com/
sanjayparekh 5y ago
I did a Show HN a little while ago but you might want to check out TogetherLetters [0]. We made it to keep going with regular updates for groups of people (friends, family, coworkers, etc.) via email. Never shared on the web and it's consistent (bi-weekly, monthly, and quarterly in the free plan, weekly added in the paid plan). It might help solve some of your FOMO pain. [0] https://www.togetherletters.com https://www.togetherletters.com
- chias 5y ago
  That looks like a wonderful project! Unfortunately, in my situation, my family is so deeply steeped in Facebook that I have no choice. We already have group chats and the like, and some stuff gets posted there, especially if someone wants me in particular to know something. But if you try to go down that road, you're only going to get the newsworthy headlines: your grandma died, Matt had a kid, etc. But in a lot of cases, people just want to shout little things at the world, and when my family does that, it's on Facebook. It's unreasonable to expect everyone I care about to announce everything twice, once to everyone and a second time to just me, so I knew I was going to miss some things. But recently it came to my attention just how much I was missing, and it's just not worth it. You only get your family once. Keeping up with the little things means getting back on Facebook, so I'm back on Facebook.

prescriptivist 5y ago

I did this too and use facebook for the marketplace and half a dozen pretty active niche groups that don't have corresponding communities outside of facebook. I agree that it was tedious but since doing that I can't muster much ire toward Facebook beyond the general ire I have for everything on the internet, which I think has been a net negative for people's happiness (broadly speaking).

qudat 5y ago

It sounds like you turned facebook into twitter. Just use twitter.

Zak 5y ago
Facebook is valuable to me if the people I want to hear from post content there, not because of its UX.

cyberpsybin 5y ago

I did the same. Spent a month blocking, unfollowing any political page that might appear. Blocked all people who post political content and now the feed is so clean for last 2 years. Another key thing is to simply not install FB on phone. Only use it once a day when on desktop. Such a nice tool to connect with old friends otherwise.

jsemrau 5y ago

Everytime I read posts like these it makes me wonder how much of this is really the truth? The notion of you-are-not-enjoying-fb-because-you-are-doing-it-wrong is regularly popping up on those discussions threads and it really feels like orchestrated corp-speak.

soylentnewsorg 5y ago

This is the big takeaway here. Companies thinking they are a monopoly, crippling their product to extract maximum short-term value (the MBA doctrine), and destroy the business long-term, because they now have an inferior product. Less and less people are using facebook. Most (worldwide) never did in the first place. But an ugly man compensates for insecurity about his physical appearance by pretending he has more power than he does, despite him in reality having plenty of power to feel secure. Facebook: you want to do something in an automated way? Enjoy your two day clickfest. Real life: yeah, I'm going to just use something else, and people coming of age will laugh about this legacy antiquated service. Do you know how you get a fresh start without this process you found tedious? Put in a bunch of fake info into your profile, then just leave the account alone, forever. Then go somewhere else. Facebook has a large userbase. If you're not there for the other users, why in the world would you not use one of the hundred other similar services? Now, as far as my personal opinion: facebook should lose the lawsuit. This extension is a script run by the user. There might be something that says the user has to click and can't run scripts, that the user agreed to. Facebook then has a case, against the user, and should start suing their users. Facebook has no standing against the people who wrote the script, but are not running it against facebook servers. I am free to write any piece of code, that does anything, as long as I don't have a contract with Facebook saying I won't. This is called freedom of speech, and a government does not have authority to make me stop. And a private company has no enforcement authority, because they're a company, not a government.

denton-scratch 5y ago
> Less and less people are using facebook. So I hear. This is the trajectory of all social-media sites; they cease to be fashionable and hip, as their early users (late teens to early 20s) move on. What remains is then children, old fuddy-duddies, politicos and advertisers. So they become even less fashionable and less hip. Consider Myspace. What surprises me is that Faceache has lasted so long. If I were into gambling on stocks, I'd be shorting Faceache.

smsm42 5y ago

You can clean up the FB feed. I've been doing it for years when I used it. FB purity plus adblockers plus ruthless unfollowing builds you a pretty clean feed after a while. But one day you realize - or at least I did - that no matter what, every time you go there, every time you click on any link, every time you read and react, every time you post - you contribute to it, and with it you strengthen the company's position and their chokehold on public discussion space, and their dominant position in the business of connecting people. No matter what you do, if you do it there, it's to their benefit. I kinda admire the genius of it, but you have other options. If you don't like what FB as a company is doing, the only way to resist it is not to play. So eventually I abandoned my carefully constructed feed and went to look for better pastures.

raindropm 5y ago

I did that too, seperate 'friends' and 'interest' account and never make it overlap, ever, and occasionally 'pruning' who you follow. I somehow enjoy what I used to hate again. It's powerful tool. Sadly, I think very few people use it this way, billions of people use it as all-in-one hub, and that leads to disaster we see nowadays.