7 ms·
I found a way to dramatically improve facebook. Around the beginning of the year I unfollowed every single friend and page, so my newsfeed is completely empty.
by mullingitover 13y ago
I found a way to dramatically improve facebook. Around the beginning of the year I unfollowed every single friend and page, so my newsfeed is completely empty. Now when I want to know what my friends are up to, I go check out their pages, essentially going from a push feed to a pull. It gets me out of the empty crack addiction-esque cycle of going to the news feed and being disappointed/bored with the lives of my friends, and instead lets me focus on what facebook is actually valuable for: party planning.
- colinbartlett 13y agoMy solution was to delete my Facebook account. Now, I engage with the people I care about via mechanisms that are far more meaningful: emails, phone calls, a coffee, a lunch.
- eyeareque 13y agoI did the same and now I'm able to focus and spend time on real friendships that matter vs. clicking through a facebook feed of what facebook decides to show me.
- CatMtKing 13y agoI don't have any reason to delete it. I get messages every so often from friends that are in town, and it makes it easier to host and plan a gathering. It also makes sharing photos among friends easy. I waste way more time on social media sites like this one than I ever have on Facebook.
- baby 13y agoI really wish I could do that. I used to ask a friend to change my password, now I use www.offsocialnetwork.com to do it (I'm doing it this week). But I can't go really long without facebook since all is planned from there, the parties, the social events, the foreign friends visiting my city, foreign friends keeping in touch with me... I guess it's easier not to have facebook when you didn't travel a lot and don't have a big social life.
- euphemize 13y agoIt's actually very easy to have a booming social life and travel tons without Facebook.
- baby 13y agoif you want to share your secrets I'm all ears. For example, last year I got to meet maybe 30 friends from all over the world because they were passing through France or wanted to go travel to the country I was traveling to. I wouldn't have met them if they didn't have my facebook as I rarely keep touch with people far from me (before facebook). My mail is filled with spam and I change my number every year. I also moved to a new city, didn't know anyone, joined the erasmus group and a few weeks after I knew 100+ people, was getting invited to parties every day, was meeting new people every day. You can always try to avoid facebook, it will be more difficult though.
- lmm 13y agoYou change your number every year? Why? If it's a privacy issue surely it's more important to change your facebook account every year.
- baby 13y agoI move a lot, China, Canada, France these last years. I don't want to keep paying to keep my number, and I don't really care about changing my number, if people want to contact me they can always find me on facebook (I have everyone there), and the few that don't use a facebook, well I don't really keep in touch with them but I don't have time to track everybody.
- Loughla 13y ago"But I can't go really long without facebook since all is planned from there, the parties, the social events, the foreign friends visiting my city, foreign friends keeping in touch with me..." I have two questions to respond to this - how did people do all of these things before the facebook platform? What is stopping you from doing these same things? I find it fascinating that people treat websites like facebook like an actual addiction, and are scared of the withdraw problems in their social life. Is there such a thing as social addiction? Is that a thing?
- dclara 13y agoSmart. Pull is future. We don't want to be pushed.
- michaelmior 13y agoIn my case, the majority of my friends only share with friends. So unfriending them all would result in mostly empty timelines for me.
- taigeair 13y agoYou can unfollow without unfriend.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- cliveowen 13y agoI honestly think Facebook was better when it was just a directory of profiles, then it decided to completely change the nature of the service by focusing entirely on the newsfeed. It sure made sense in terms of users engagement, but the value I get from it has declined steeply over the last few years. Now I only use the messenger app.
- sharkweek 13y agoThe "profile" meant something back when Facebook first started - in fact one of my favorite things was when the news feed would announce things like "Friend1 updated his favorite movies" - then I would click and go see what they added. I can't even guess when the last time was that I looked at someone's information directly on their profile on FB
- tonydiv 13y agoI have completely hidden my news feed. Since I consider FB only to be valuable as a utility, i.e. a means of communication or a repository of information such as where someone lives, the newsfeed is a complete waste of time and useless. My solution is to use custom CSS to hide the newsfeed, but keep everything else. As a result, I spent 1/10th the time on Facebook, and only use it when I need to get information from it. https://medium.com/productivity-efficiency/631ed8f466e1 https://medium.com/productivity-efficiency/631ed8f466e1
- mandlar 13y agoI really like this idea. I think I'll give it a go. Thanks for sharing it!
- tonydiv 13y agoYou're welcome! Let me know how it works for you in the Medium comments.
- kostko 13y agoI did something similar on Youtube, I've hidden all the side videos to help me focus on the video I was watching. But on FB, I unfollowed 99% of the people, and only left things like 'March Against Monsanto', and 'Naturalnews', so so my feed only contains stuff that matters to me.
- bencollier49 13y agoHmm, Facebook seems to randomly refollow people on my behalf when I try this. Perhaps it's latency or something?
- joeblau 13y agoYeah i did the Facebook 300 Diet #FB300D 2 years ago and it was amazing. Basically, I unfriended all but 300 people and my feed got much better. I even created a word document that details who you should unfriend.
- alex_doom 13y agoExactly, event planning/tracking is the only reason I stay on.
- dminor 13y ago> Now when I want to know what my friends are up to, I go check out their pages, essentially going from a push feed to a pull. I think you just invented MySpace.
- zk00006 13y agoMy friend had a solution to keep maximally 100 people on his account. One day, I received a message that I had to go. OK. A few months he asked me for friendship again :)
- jeangenie 13y agoSounds like you're still addicted, just using a different way.
- sidcool 13y agoThat's exactly how Orkut worked.