1493: Making the Tools Work for You, Not the Other Way Around

As an experiment, I’ve un-suspended my Facebook account. This blog post is the first I’ve mentioned of doing so, and I haven’t really got back into “using” the site as such just yet, because there are a few things I wanted to do first.

Specifically, I wanted to take a bit more control of my experience there. The reason I shut down my account in the first place was because the amount of nonsense being posted was reaching intolerable levels — social media experts call this a poor signal-to-noise ration. In other words, little in the way of actual communication was going on, and instead it was becoming little more than Upworthy reshares (and, thankfully, Upworthy seems to have been all but forgotten now) and “OMG! I CAN’T BELIEVE THIS THING!” posts that people haven’t fact-checked before posting. It was becoming infuriating and, as I believe I said around the time I closed my account, it was stopping Facebook from being actually useful — its original stated purpose was to be a “social tool that connects you with the people around you”, after all, and for a while it did an admirable job of that.

Anyway. In order to take control of my experience, I’m doing a few things that can largely be classified as “cleaning up my profile”. I’ve “unliked” as many pages as it’s possible to “unlike” — aside from ones that I actually do either want to show support for or get information from — and I’ve had a ruthless cutback on my friends list. There are still nearly 200 people on there, but when I compare it to some of the people I removed — many of whom had over a thousand “friends” — it seems a little more manageable. I’ve cut people whom I haven’t spoken to for a while, or whom I didn’t feel I’d had worthwhile interactions with online, or whom I simply didn’t really actually like all that much. (Harsh but fair!) I’ve also cut a lot of people whom I mainly speak to on Twitter, and anyone that I wouldn’t classify as a particularly close friend. (In other words, if I’ve removed you on Facebook, it doesn’t necessarily mean I don’t like you; it just means that I don’t count you in my closest circle of friends, since the way Facebook is built has always felt like something that you should share with people you actually know, rather than people who are just Internet acquaintances at best.)

I am attempting to make Facebook work for me, then, and hopefully it will provide a better experience for me. I’m still no fan of the site itself — the interface for unliking pages and removing friends was one of the most cumbersome, badly-designed pieces of UI I’ve seen for a long time, the current layout seems designed to make certain pieces of information as difficult to find as possible, and I’m really not a fan of how the company does business — but I am keen to use it to stay in touch with those people for whom Facebook is the best (or indeed, in some cases, only) means of reaching them.

We’ll see how long it lasts this time around. I’d like to keep an open mind, but we’ll see. And if you dare post any shit from Upworthy at me, you’re on my list. And not my friends list.