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Comment by zacharycohn | Hacker News Reader

I don't know why more people don't use the "hide" feature.

I was rapidly becoming sick of Facebook. I only friended people that I'd met before, but even so it was polluted by people who I went to middle school, etc. with who I really didn't know that well even then.

Then I found the "Hide" option. I hide probably 95% of my "friends." After I did this, I LOVED using Facebook again. Every time I logged in, I was able to keep up with good friends of mine who live in other parts of the state, country, world. These are people I DO care about, often talk to in other ways, but it's a nice aggregator. If I post something, everyone that isn't directly relevant to my life can still see and comment on it, but I don't have to see their stuff.

It's perfect, it really revitalized Facebook for me and it's actually FUN to use again.

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I tried doing the "Hide" thing for a while, but there are two problems:

1) It's a pain in the ass to hunt down and hide various people and apps, and you have to keep up with it. Consequently, your friends who are likely to say interesting things but not spend a ton of time tweaking their FB settings tend to drift off, driving your signal down.

2) Hiding people is a blunt instrument -- you hide someone who's 98% noisy but 2% interesting, and you've hidden more signal you wanted to see. Then, when they ask you about why you didn't see their baby photos, you have to tell them that the answer is because you were sick of "Which Twilight Character Are You?" and hid them.

In the end, it's easier just to quit and go back to using the regular internet.

Hide Applications.

Add people into lists.

It took me about one week of using facebook + filtering people to get to the point where I enjoyed using facebook again. No adding people to lists, no hunting down people, nothing.

Honestly I don't mind keeping FB as a Rolodex of people I may only tangentially know, but I don't necessarily want to know what they had for breakfast. Hiding totally solved this problem for me too.

Making use of EdgeRank gives me more control than just hiding people.

Whenever I'd like to see more of somebody, I go to their page, make a couple of comments, and pronto, their posts enter my stream, squeezing out posts of people I didn't interact with. Problem solved.

> Then I found the "Hide" option.

I didn't know Facebook could do that! In general, I find fb's user interface confusing. Recently, I was trying to get it to display a list of all my friends; I managed to get it done eventually, but it took effort and frustration.

I agree. The day I learned to hide (apps spam etc and people) the day I started using Facebook without any issue.

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