Daniel Pearson

Confession:  I started hating Facebook a few months ago.  

It was like a romance gone sour and I didn’t know how to fix it. I know many of you feel the same way… and if you don’t feel it now, you will. It’s just a matter of time.

So when did things start going sour?

Probably when Facebook constantly told methat people were leveling up on Farmville, kept changing the site’s layout, or when my ‘friends’ deemed it necessary to post a minute-by-minute live stream of their pregnancies and the resulting children.

Maybe you’re at this point and just want to delete anyone and anything who posts things you dislike but… I do like my friends. I even like my acquaintances most of the time. I enjoy knowing that they are doing alright and like to be there when they have something worthy of sharing… but sometimes they share things that, quite frankly, I don’t care about at all. Worse yet, Facebook tells me about even more with open graph.

Hell, we’ve all shared things we should not have.

I’ll use myself as an example. I’ve probably posted about my work and encouraged (directly or otherwise) my friends to join my many causes no less than a thousand times.  All of my friends know about my company but I continue to share. I’m sure they could name countless other times I’ve shared or spammed them.

(Thanks to the friends who haven’t deleted me.  If you have, I would have to.)

Realistically speaking, if we unfriended or unliked everyone/everything who slipped up and posted something that we didn’t care about, we would have zero friends/likes on Facebook. (Actually… I would still like ‘Boo’ because it’s just sooooooo cute, but I digress.) The real point is, if we want to enjoy our Facebook once again it’s going to take work.  

We have to start curating our own content and here are some tips:

1.  Unfriend (unlike) things you don’t care about no matter what they say.  
I was liking Pepsi. I HATE Pepsi. I was friends with the only person in high school I would do anything to never speak with then, now, or ever. Why?

2.  Hide the types of posts that you don’t like by the people you actually care about.  
John posts great status updates but is an awful photographer, hide his photos. Jane is a beautiful fool, show me her bathing suit shots and hide the rest… you get the point.

3.  Have “friend-erventions”
Get it? It’s like an intervention… but for friends. (My friend Eric Jorgenson will appreciate the word mashup.) Tell people that what they are sharing is shit. I want to know if I shared something that my audience doesn’t want to hear.  

4.  Don’t dig yourself into a deeper hole!  
We’ve been reckless in the past, so reckless in fact that it opened the doors to new social networks that capitalize on our behavior. (A few examples… Twitter [for concise updates], Pinterest [for photos], Path [for your ‘closest’ friends], Viddy [for videos], and I’m just waiting for the pregnancy network to launch.  

Be careful who you ‘friend’, what you ‘like’, and what you allow to pass by in your news feed.  Facebook curates your feed based your actions. Changing your actions means a more relevant feed.  

I hope this novel helped. If you think I shouldn’t have shared it, please, let me know and unfollow / unfriend / unsubscribe (whatever kids call it these days) me immediately.

<a href=”https://twitter.com/DanielPearson” class=”twitter-follow-button” data-show-count=”false”>Follow @DanielPearson</a>

<script>!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?’http’:’https’;if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+’://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js’;fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, ‘script’, ‘twitter-wjs’);</script>