A post over at A Confederacy of Spinsters, called Your Status Update Not Welcome, inspired me to write a comment. After a couple of minutes trying to think of a concise sentence or two for the comments section of their page, I decided I needed to write a full-blown post about it. From the original post:
If I had block button, I’d erase from my feed:
Anything relating to babies.
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Bible Verses
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Mushy sentiments about having the best boyfriend/husband/wife/girlfriend EVER!
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Any vacation picture without a person in it.
I would take this idea of a topic-blocking button a bit further. I wish there was a way to just ignore any status updates that are uninteresting. Facebook could devise a way to figure that out, easily. Let’s say an update get’s viewed 50 times, or something, and no one has liked it or commented on it yet, then just stop showing it in feeds. Most of what people post on F-book (I heard a couple of now-in-college kids use this term the other day. I love it because I hate it.) is mundane enough that it rightfully should be ignored. I guess for the saps out there, there would be a way to turn this feature off so everything would be in the feed, but I think most of us would enjoy the feature.
Facebook would probably be hesitate to add something like this because they seem compelled to overload everyone with as much information as possible. Maybe they have decided this is the way to keep people hooked. At this point though, people are already addicted and it might be best to just not annoy their addicts with uninteresting status updates.
