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Comment by jxi | Hacker News Reader

The question is: can I opt out of this, or am I obliged to deal with this as long as I'm a Facebook user. I personally find this is pretty bad. I don't want my friends seeing my past likes from several years ago and seeing me endorse something stupid that I liked before (on the front page). Do I need to go through my likes and curate it all the time? It's different if it's just on my profile because having it in the news feed suggests that I liked this thing recently.

I think I'm seriously 1 step closer to just closing my Facebook account. Also, look at all those nasty ads on the right side. I use ad blocker so I don't see any of those, but looking at his video, that is definitely noisy.

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To my mind it's the price of publically 'liking' something. With that in mind, I only 'like' things that I would be happy to market to my friends.

Have you manually retroactively disliked things you liked years ago, before policy changes?

I have, and do so regularly. I'm hoping and wishing for something better than Facebook to come along so I can jump ship, because of things like this.

Is there an app that can go through and unlike all? I don't care enough about liking something to have FB use it this way.

The problem is not just that Facebook is reposting one of your likes, it's that they're associating your like with a related item. The OP liked one article on vice.com, and now Facebook is promoting that he liked something "related" to penis shaped waffles.

Sorry, I was unclear about what I meant by 'market to my friends.' What I intended to communicate was that I only like entities that I would trust to market to my friends responsibly.

I would never like a site like Vice because I know that they promote NSFW and lowbrow content for pageviews, and I don't want to be associated with that. On the other hand, I'm fine with liking bands that I know the spirit of, or small local businesses that I trust.

...which crosses the borderline from "intrusive" to "outright deceptive".

I believe it's possible to turn off under "ads and friends" here: http://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=ads&section=social&... but you never can be too sure with Facebook

Yes - you can opt out of this - to do so, go to your settings, then click on 'ads' in the sidebar on the left and select 'edit' on the ads & friends section - there you can set "Pair my social actions with ads for" to "no one".

Here's the link: https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=ads&section=social...

Are you sure that's what that's for? When I go to that setting (which I'd already set to "no one" in an earlier privacy audit), the example it shows of what it controls is very different from the "related post" issue that's being complained about here.

Why do you like things to begin with?

What do you get from it?

I don't get anything, but sometimes I'd like to show support to some particular effort/product that I think is worth my time.

Also, I think it used to be an "interests" section in Facebook, and all of those interests somehow got systematically migrated to "likes", I think. Those are the sketchy ones that I think I now need to go back and curate.

You can opt out, but get ready to have to go re-opt-out every time Facebook changes a font somewhere on the website.

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