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mullingitover

Facebook is a fantastic product, as long as you use it properly and not remotely as Facebook wants you to.

- Most important step: Unfollow every single person and page

- Follow entertaining groups like 'This cat is c h o n k y'

- Keep facebook messenger

- Use FB events for party planning

That's it, and it's easy: you get all the social graph functionality, all the event planning and chat stuff. The feed (if you even visit it, personally I might spend five minutes a week there) is fun and doesn't make you feel disappointed with your elderly family members.

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I'm glad to find a like-minded person.

I unfollowed all my friends years ago. If I want to see them, I peek into events we have in common, groups or I go to their feed directly.

My feed is mostly content from pages I enjoy along groups and communities that cover topics which interest me. I have a handful of friends who post about technology or hobbies that are not blocked from my feed.

I have an older account that has a lot of friends in common with my main one but without the blocks. I find its feed to be very painful to use. Photos of people's food, people's pets, people sharing "inspirational" quotes on stock photos, a lot of selfies and people's children. It takes forever to find information about topics I actually enjoy reading about.

I would unfriend those people if it did not come with the social problem of them coming back disappointed asking why I am no longer friend with them. As if social network contacts were actually friends and as if unfriending someone on a social network meant you are no longer friend with them. I also enjoy being able to check up on them every now and them, which I could not do if I were not connected with them due the their privacy settings.

Same here. I see two things on my FB feed: meme pages (cat is c h o n k as stated above), and memes shared by friends from the same meme pages.

The thing about "X is a fantastic tool as long as you use it in a way the developers never intended", is that sooner or later, some interaction you rely on will break because the devs either don't care about or actively want to remove your use-case. Which is a problem if you've invested a lot into it at that point.

This is one of the major reasons why I try to limit my use of websites for anything important and prefer to use normal, local applications that don't rely heavily on someone else's servers. It's a lot harder for other people to stop you from using the applications and also helps prevent things from changing/breaking all the sudden.

I'm willing to roll the dice for a while. Chat and events planning are pretty basic features, if Facebook screw those up then it probably means that someone else has come along and does them better.

Why would you want to unfollow your own friends? To me, that's always been the one useful feature of Facebook.

The problem is FB uses that to suggest content from their friends. Then you get random stuff from randos

It's easy when you don't have any.

So you don't see the opinions that make you hate them and end the friendship over thoughts that would never be uttered if it were just the two of you.

If I'm interacting with my friends on facebook, it means I'm spending irreplaceable moments of my life looking at a screen and not spending it with them in the real world.

Even worse, I'm helping Facebook make money that they'll use to further harm society. It's a lose-lose.

I don't know if I discovered this plan independently or if some like-minded person shared this strategy years ago and I copied it from them, but it 100% works. I miss the page "Memes so deep and dank they make you commit suicide". It was 100% the name that got it banned: the content was pretty much all reposts from /r/ComedyBuddhism (a.k.a. non-humor or, occasionally, anti-humor).

...why?

The low effort meme reposts are the worst part of FB. When FB used to show me the things I followed at least it made sense to log in.

Following friends is the sole reason to even have a Facebook account. Installing Messenger is nothing but a sign of sheer ignorance or apathy.

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