Likes labours lost: You get the Facebook you deserve

Recently, Wired reporter Mat Honan conducted an experiment to see what happens if you Like every Page that appears in your Facebook feed. The result was his Friends’ stories being crowded out by updates from noisy brands. No great surprises there.

But here’s a question. If we’re saying that brand stories blocking updates from your friends is a bad thing, what exactly is the logic of Liking any Facebook brand page?

Even if an interest in something suggests you may appreciate news about it, the idea that you would choose for those to be injected in and around stories of your friends’ lives is pretty insane.

It’s also one of the reasons that Facebook can start to feel so repetitive and numbing. The newsfeed puts the commercial, the mundane, and the largest life events all side by side. And they’re further trivialised by the act of idly thumbing through on a tiny smartphone screen at Thursday lunchtime.

Partly to blame is Facebook’s smart use of language. Equating like with Like isn’t like for like. And the problem continues with another core feature: there are friends.. and then there are Friends.

Many users have long passed the magic ‘Dunbar number’, which states that humans can only maintain around 150 stable relationships at any time. As a result, it’s inevitable that people you care about are going to get lost.

The most honestly named feature in all of Facebook is the Newsfeed. But the rest of the language around it stops us from asking the simple question: How do I tell it only to give me the stories that matter.

So here’s a new approach. Every time you see a story that doesn’t interest you, click the little menu button in the top right corner of that card and Unfollow (not unfriend) that person. Go to your likes page (Facebook.com/(your username)/likes/) and consider who you might want to ditch.

Nobody is making you live with your current Facebook experience and it doesn’t take long to fix. What’s stopping you?