So I have a FB account I started many years ago but was never a very active user, and I went years without even visiting FB. But every now and then there’s a family announcement or something I want to check out.
(Warning: political content- skip this paragraph if you wish)
Then when I got on there a few months ago, I noticed a few of the people I have friended who I went to high school with, or were friends with in my 20s but lost touch with, are now pretty rabid pro-trumpers. I became sort of fascinated with this real-world display of trump support from people who I used to like, or at least tolerate. Not that I don’t know people IRL who are trumpers, but politics isn’t always brought up at things like family get-togethers like it is the way people share pro-trump or anti-Democrat memes on FB. So it’s become kind of a fascinating bellwether of trumpism for me as I occasionally lurk on FB to see the latest funhouse-mirror distortion of reality my old acquaintances are pushing.
So-- to my questions:
I think this is a pretty obvious ‘no’, but when I look at my main ‘wall’ or whatever it’s called these days, I see like one FB ‘friend’ post followed by like a dozen outside posts and reels and things before I see another ‘friend’ post. I know this is the very point of the existence of FB, to influence us and / or get us to buy stuff, but is there any way to turn off the extraneous content and just see the posts from my FB ‘friends’?? I know, it’s probably naive to even ask.
I notice with some of the posts, usually from my trumper ‘friends’ I see a message that says something like “this message is restricted to certain people”. So apparently there’s a setting or way to establish a subgroup of friends within one’s friend group. I imagine that’s for postings that are too controversial to share with one’s entire friend group, so you can create a ‘secret society’ for like-minded people within that larger group. How long has that existed? I don’t think that was a feature years ago.
#1 Click on the 3 dots of posts from people/pages you don’t want to see and Hide or Block them. I really only see posts from friends and groups I subscribe to anymore.
#2 You’ve always been able to do this. When you create a post under your name will be a little gray box defaulted to “Friends.” Click on that and you can select who can see that post.
Thanks! Good answers right out of the gate. Follow up question to this:
So, it’s sort of a ‘war of attrition’ to just keep blocking content you don’t want to see, until you end up with mostly friends and subscribed groups? But then I imagine new algorithm-fed content keeps popping up, so it’s kind of like whack-a-mole?
You can’t turn it off, but you can look at a feed with just your friends. In a desktop browser, you should see ‘Feeds’ in the left column. Click it and then select ‘Friends’. That will be a feed with the posts from your friends as well as a few ads. I’m not sure how to do it on a phone.
There has been the ability to restrict posts to just a subset of people for a long time. Almost since the beginning. Perhaps it’s recent that they added that restricted message.
More or less. Eventually it gets the idea. Occasionally you’ll still have to block or hide something, but for the most part I only see my own friends and groups. The reels still come up but I don’t think there’s anything you can do about that.
There is a free extension called FB Purity (FB in this case stands for Fluff Busting, due to copyrights to using FB to mean Facebook) which can hide Reels and a lot of other things you don’t want to see. There is an ongoing struggle between FP Purity and Facebook. Every so often Facebook introduces a new wrinkle that makes the extension not work, and (usually) in a few days FB Purity has worked around it. I mostly loathe Facebook, but I still use it for some groups that I am interested in following; FB Purity helps that not be an awful experience.
I also heartily endorse FB Purity. You can hide things by phrase or word too, so if someone you essentially want in your feed is going on and on about their Beanie Baby collection you can set a filter to hide all posts with the words Beanie Baby in them.
And yes, “Feeds” is the one to look at to weed out all the stuff they want you to see but you don’t care about. On the phone there should be a bottom bar with Home, Notifications, and the hamburger/3 slash Menu. Hit the Menu and you’ll see Feeds in there somewhere - it tends to drift around sometimes.
Sadly FBP is only for the desktop not your phone, but if you do any browsing that way it is SO worth it!
What an odious, odious place FB has become. I was browsing through the algorithm-generated posts yesterday, and there are posts absolutely tailored to my interests (amazing Michigan hiking trail no one knows about!), mixed in with awful right wing / conspiracy theory posts (doctor shares terrifying news about the new cancer epidemic caused by the Covid vaccine).
I mean, I had heard that was the case, I knew this, but getting back on FB and seeing it for real is horrifying. It’s a brainwashing machine. How does Zuckerberg sleep at night?
Funny, but here’s the thing-- lots of sites use algorithm-fed content to micro-target a person’s interests…in order to sell them stuff. Zuckerberg could do that, and still have just as big a pile of money to sleep soundly on. But the FB site is using algorithm-fed content to micro-target a person’s interests, not just in order to sell them stuff, but to brainwash them into believing crazy-ass shit.
YouTube’s algorithms track and target my interests scarily well. Often I’ll get on YT and see videos related to a subject I just read about in a SDMB thread earlier that day. But it doesn’t serve me up crazy CT nonsense.