social media hacking

[ironymaiden]

i've been staying away from facebook, which is great for my mental health but cuts off a major communication channel for my friends with kids. that blows. it also means that i don't see posts from my niece and nephew, who are awesome young adults.

one of my friends has been trying to get me to use Facebook Purity but since it's a browser extension and i'm more likely to look at facebook on mobile, it's not useful to me. which is too bad, because i need keyword blocking.

but i found the best thing: Friendly. (or at least it's the best thing as of today.) for my purposes it's definitely worth slipping them a couple bucks. basically they take the facebook mobile page designed for developing countries and customize the display. it even includes messaging.

here's my preliminary keyword list: trump, homeless, clinton, hillary, congress, share, 45, copy, white house, breitbart, bannon

i probably don't need "homeless", it's just instinct from NextDoor. i added "45" and "white house" after my first browse.

i can still see topical stuff and news that doesn't mention the forbidden words. i can't see earnest "copy don't share" memes, i can't see rage posts about political stuff. i'll probably need to shape some keywords for the left-leaning fake news sites (the people who used to share the right-leaning ones have mostly unfriended me) but they need to slip though first.

that said, check out a not-atypical screen:


Edited to add: i use the Make America Kittens Again extension. apparently the T-word in this post triggers replacement of the above screenshot with sweet kitties. took me a couple attempted edits before i realized there was nothing wrong with my photo hosting 😆

Comments

[annofowlshire]

I hate that "manage Facebook" is now on our list of social responsibilities. I tried to check in on a friend recently but couldn't see anything personal through more than 100 shared memes/gifs/etc.. they'd posted in the last 48 hours and gave up. It makes it less useful of a tool for the job, but it feels like it's the only universal one.

[ironymaiden]

i feel like it's an addiction - people complain about how it's a waste of time and it makes them sad, but they don't stop engaging. i guess i just posted about that myself.

at least now i can only see actual life updates.

[buhrger]

i may want to think about doing something like this my own self. i just wish people would post actual content from their own lives, but so much is links to [whatever] that i don't really need to see.

[ironymaiden]

what i noticed today is that without political angst and the shares, there's almost no content there. i got to stuff i hadn't read in no time. the impression that facebook is more active than DW is a lie created by showing you shit that your friends "liked" and so on.

[buhrger]

yeah, you're not worng. when you ignore the "like"s and "share"s and "reacted to"s, it really drops off. take out the "commented on"s too (cuz half the time, it tells you that they commented but doesn't show you what they said) and it's nearly all gone.

[annofowlshire]

I stuck with FB for a while after I moved because I wanted to keep up with friends and their lives, but yeah. I found that wasn't what made up 99.99% of the content in my feed :(

[laridian]

That looks like my Tumblr dashboard some days. I use Tumblr Savior plugin on Chrome to avoid soooo many keywords...

I really, really don't like FB for so many reasons. I find it user-unfriendly at best. But many things, like the Row by Row Challenge, can only be found on FB, so I go on there when I have to. :/

I also don't like how I can click one link to an interesting article on FB, and ever afterwards it posts articles about that thing only, or news articles from the same area. Maybe I just wanted to read about the the albino moose in Deadhorse, Alaska, but I don't need all the daily Alaska news of crime, zoning, etc. ...

[ironymaiden]

i HATE how having a facebook page has replaced having a website for so many events. facebook actively HIDES information. what use is that? it doesn't even cost anything to set up squarespace or a tumblr. just ugh.

[sleepybadger]

I really need to get rolling with one of those, I've hidden many of the fake news sites, but mostly I just want to see what my family and friends are up to, especially the ones who live far away. I tried today and just couldn't do it, my entire feed would look like your screen shot above. Sigh.