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Comment by sdrinf | Hacker News Reader

I did this a year ago, and it considerably improved my Fb feed’s signal/noise ratio.

Specific procedure I’d recommend is to make this a regular process: open fb feed, read until you find a thing which does not improves your life, click on owner (author / group) -click “friend” -> unfollow. Iterate until sanity is restored.

And one moral of this story (hi Facebook, please understand this) is that people are multidimensional. Just because you know someone once, in one context in real life, does not, actually, imply positive relationship on informational ecologies for all time in the future. “Authentic self” as defined by Facebook as a single coherent identity is a lie.

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Maybe I'm too forgiving but I'll generally just snooze a person unless they're genuinely consistently horrible.

People change. I had friends who would post tireless political rants that just post memes now.

My experience is that I have hundreds of people to snooze, and would rather just have a fresh start and let those people trickle back in if they want to. Maybe I should just make a new account.

I did that last year, created a new account. Added back only a few real friends.

But slowly started getting requests from many of the previous friends. Some thought I had unfriended them, so had to explain to them that it was a new account. Felt obligated to add back most of the people. Now my feed is useless again.

Perhaps this should be yearly ritual.

Things to remember when you create a new account: 1. an alias for profile name rather than real name 2. don't put your picture in your profile

This way, you can add people you want to, and you'll not get requests from people you're hiding from.

That process is what made me stop logging in (haven't actually logged back in to delete, it's been two years - stopped when I stopped needing it for university groups).

There was just nothing, or so little, that 'improves my life' as you put it, nor anything close. Just shit and drivel.

And it's not made for it. Quality doesn't equal traffic, nor even engagement in a monetisable sense. If it were, it would very quickly have learned that I didn't want to see memes, full stop. Nope, feed continued to be full of valueless memes.

For a brief period I considered I might be 'missing out', but it doesn't take long to realise that if you're missing out through not being on the right social media platform... who or what exactly are you missing out on.

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