Why (And How) I Still Like Facebook

Hi, friends!

A pretty common sentiment these days is that Facebook is garbage. People complain that all they ever see is arguments about politics, oversharing about mundane things, and requests for help with a virtual farm. A lot of teenagers never bother making an account because it's "uncool" now that their parents and other "old people" use it (or because they're concerned about said old people not understanding Facebook etiquette and causing embarrassment).

I can't offer much advice for the teenagers here because A) I don't mind my parents seeing the things I post, B) I've taught my parents how Facebook works, and C) it's honestly cute to see comments like "SUSAN YOU LOOK BEAUTIFUL. LOVE GRANNY" on a picture Susan gets tagged in. Granny is doing her best and just wants to keep up with her family online! Yay for Granny!

As for the other problems people have with Facebook, I have a ton of suggestions for improving your experience and getting rid of the clutter.

Don't be afraid to unfollow people.
If you have a friend who only ever posts about political things, unfollow them! I've definitely unfollowed people in the past when I didn't want to completely unfriend them but also didn't care about any of the things they were sharing. Every once in a while, I'll go to the list of people I've unfollowed and check out their profiles to see if they're worth refollowing. If their posts will just clutter my timeline with things I don't want to see, I leave them as they are. (This sounds super rude of me, I know. I promise the unfollowed list is pretty short.)
Related: There's a snooze button.
Someone you know just got a new dog and won't stop posting hourly pictures of them? Snooze their posts and maybe they'll calm down in a while. If not, there's always the above option.

Snooze if you think things will improve in a month. If there's no hope, you can unfollow instead.

You can block pages to avoid seeing their posts when friends share them.
I recently recommended this technique to a friend who was bummed about seeing recipe videos all over Facebook while she was trying to stick to a diet. If you block the pages that the videos come from (Tasty, BuzzFeed Food, etc.), you won't see their posts being shared. Most of the pages I've blocked are for LuLaRoe saleswomen because I had friends who would share their posts to enter giveaways and I wanted to still see my friends' posts without seeing videos about paper-thin leggings. I've also blocked a lot of Facebook games because I really don't care if someone reached level 8,032 on Candy Crush.
You can stop seeing posts from a certain person that your friend is tagged in by clicking "hide all from [person]" or something to that effect. Like if your friend has a relative that decides to tag their entire family in every update about their baby or something, you can hide everything from that person and quit seeing posts about people you don't know. (Why do people do that??)

Don't care about sports but have a friend who excitedly shares every update from their favorite team for some awful reason? Block those posts without blocking your friend.

Turn off autoplay for videos.
Videos starting automatically makes me angry, even when they're muted. In fact, muted autoplay is almost as frustrating as autoplaying with sound because if I actually do want to see the video, now I have to rewind it and turn the sound on so I can hear what I missed while deciding whether or not to watch.

Curse you, autoplay. No one asked for this.

You can turn notifications for a post on and off.
If you've ever seen a post requesting recommendations or advice and wanted to see the results, chances are someone else had that same idea and commented "." or "following" on that post. There is absolutely no reason to ever do that. Just turn the notifications on and you'll see future comments. Or, if you were the first to comment "Congrats!" on a post about exciting news and get a ding every few minutes from other people congratulating that person, you can turn off those notifications just as easily.

I don't often run into the problem of a post being annoyingly popular, but this is how I'd handle it if I did.

Set your news feed to most recent.
One of the biggest complaints I have about Instagram (and a large part of why I never bothered to install it on my current phone or the previous one) is that the posts aren't shown chronologically. Why?! I don't care what an algorithm thinks I want to see. What I want to see is *all* of the things my friends are sharing *in the order* that they're being shared. Clearly, algorithms aren't smart enough to realize that some people need things to be in the right order or else they'll go nuts.

Of course, Facebook is playing around with "most recent" meaning "most recently commented on" or something now, but my news feed is in the proper order most of the time.

Get rid of unwanted groups and group notifications.
I really wish Facebook wouldn't let people add you into groups without your permission. If someone adds you into a group you don't want to be part of (or if you decide you're done being in a certain group), you can leave and also check a box to make people unable to add you back in. If you want to remain in a group but get too many notifications from it, you can adjust those settings to bring the number down to a more desirable level.

Begone, MLM groups!

Turn off excessive notifications from events.
This usually becomes handy when I get invited to an event that's designed to collect addresses for wedding invitations. Even if the couple has a Google Doc or website for people to use to submit their addresses, there are always people who post their addresses in the group discussion area anyway. The ability to receive notifications for only host updates makes that problem go away.

I promise the original picture looked much nicer than my stick figure version.

If you don't block ads entirely, you can hide ads about certain subjects.

The only options right now are alcohol, parenting, and pets, but more topics might be added eventually. It's surprisingly thoughtful of Facebook to let people opt out of seeing ads about these things. I've known people who have had infertility issues or miscarriages and cried over seeing ads about babies and pregnancy. I can imagine that a recovering alcoholic or someone with a fear of certain animals would also prefer to not see ads that would cause an emotional response. Personally, I turned all three of these topics off simply because they aren't relevant to my life and I'd rather see ads for Ulta or Nintendo or something else I may actually care about. (Of course, since I block all ads indiscriminately, it doesn't actually matter. I mostly wanted to show Facebook that I appreciate the ability to do this.)

Way to go, Facebook! I hope they include a way to avoid ads about engagement/marriage someday. That's another subject that can be pretty touchy and painful.

Best of all: Install Fluff Busting Purity and customize to your heart's content.
You may have noticed that my screenshots don't look exactly like what your Facebook looks like. This glorious extension is the reason why. The improvements it makes to my news feed are so great that I never use Facebook on my phone anymore. I'll check notifications there but any and all browsing happens on my computer because that's where FBP can fix everything. Thanks to FBP, I don't see "Bob liked this post" or "Marie commented on this post" anymore. No game or app requests to deny. No garbage cluttering the left side of the screen. Most recent is the default sort option for the news feed. I can even filter out pictures of babies (though doing that would make about half of my news feed disappear).

Browser extensions can be so dang handy. I've been using FBP for years and love it!

FBP may or may not get rid of sponsored posts and ads. I'm not actually sure how effective it is, because I also have an adblocker extension installed. Browsing the internet ad-free is such a wonderful thing.

If I had to only use Facebook on my phone and/or didn't know about all the tips I shared in this post, I'd probably hate it, too. A lot of that still depends on who your friends are and what they post, obviously; if you're friends with a bunch of annoying people, any social media platform would be awful. However, I find that Facebook is the most effective and overall most pleasant way of seeing what my friends and relatives are up to. It's great to still know what's going on with people from my hometown even though I haven't been there in two years. I would feel insanely isolated if I didn't have Facebook to let me see how people are doing. I want to see where your son is going on his mission, your cute selfie, your cat inconveniencing you by sitting on something, the cool cake you made, your flushed face after you ran a marathon, your recreation of an old picture, your fun holiday decorations, your family photos, your blog posts, your ramblings about something you have passion for, your movie recommendations... I want to still feel like part of my friends' lives even though I'm so very far away from most of you.

Facebook definitely isn't perfect, but with a decent amount of tweaking, it's still a great place to share.

Love,
Lizzie