I last used Facebook about, oh, I don’t know, three or four years ago. Back then, I found it extremely annoying, and mostly just a constant barrage of noise, with people sending you endless game invites and urgent news about how their relationships were now “complicated”, posting inane status updates and raving about stuff on your wall. I quickly got enough of it and terminated my account.
Just recently, however, for reasons we need not get into, I gave it another shot, and this time, it all feels… different. There’s a lot less noise. I can’t even see any status updates, that stuff seems to have disappeared completely, so has all the pointless details about my friends’ lives that used to be in my face all the time. There’s no wall anymore, there’s now a “timeline”, though I’m not entirely sure what the difference is, except that it seems nicer now, somehow. Basically, there’s no longer the endless flow of crap, instead it’s just a nice way to stay connected with a select group of friends and… well, have conversations. And look at some photos now and then.
What happened? Do I actually have to stop disliking Facebook now?
Sounds to me like you just don’t ever look at your news feed. All those update statuses are still going on, you just aren’t using that part of the site.
Yeah, it sounds like you’re just looking at your own timeline (aka your personal profile page) instead of looking at your news feed, which is where you’d see your friends’ status updates.
Facebook has cleaned up the way game invites etc. work. It’s now much easier to clean that stuff out of your feed so that it never shows up again. I think the interface is overall a little cleaner too, although objectively still pretty cluttered.
IMHO, Facebook is what you make it. You choose the people you see and what you see from them. If someone is always posting things that annoy you, unsubscribe or remove them from your list of friends.
For some time now they’ve given a little more control over what we select as far as our newsfeeds. In the past you had to more or less drop the person to get rid of certain things. Now you can select to not see games or not see music or just not see them at all. You can block game notifications completely or let them all show up.
This is a big one. I have friends who complain IRL about game invites and game updates cluttering up their newsfeed, but if you turn off invites and game updates, you never see that crap. Two clicks and you never again have to know that Cindy planted turnips or that Steve rolled a lucky 7.
Your rite. facebook is better then its been. there always making it better and its just that you have to loose the people you dont want. it doesn’t effect my friends and I. we think its literally a million times faster then it used to be. people still put picture’s of there kid’s and car’s on their and pic’s of what they ate. the irony is it’s like the old facebook but more good.
Yeah, I’m pretty much a Facebook curmudgeon of the “get offa my lawn” variety. I am systematically ‘unliking’ everything I’ve ever liked; and deleting all my posts, and untagging myself in pictures. My goal is to keep a running month of current activity available in Facebook. I’m kind of getting paranoid about my privacy after I tweeted something and it showed up in Facebook. I must have linked them, but I sure don’t remember it.
Wait, you can do that without turning off apps entirely now? Because that was the problem before. You either turned off the entire thing, or you had to individually turn off every app.
Not that I care much anymore–if I want to know about a friend, I go to their timeline. If a friend wants me to know something about them, they know to write on my timeline. The only thing the newsfeed is good for is the very occasional good image macro.
