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Comment by ldd | Hacker News Reader

I know this might sound like a really non-efficient thing to do, but you can individually unfollow every single one of your contacts. I only have around ~200 friends so unfollowing them wasn't that hard.

Nowadays, I love going to Facebook. My news feed is completely empty.

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I don't go to that extreme, but I did find Facebook was much more manageable when I started just unfollowing anyone whose posts/reshares annoyed me more than a couple of times.

I've probably only unfollowed about 10% of my total friends list, but the difference is immense, a lot of the noise tends to come from a small subset of the people, in my experience.

This is a missed opportunity. As Shirky points out, social media is "publish, then filter", and you've found a powerful filter that lets you reap the benefits. (And he also points out power laws--10% of the people in your feed post 90% of the garbage.)

While I don't log in to Facebook more than once every six months, your observation gives me hope that I might be able to find some utility in it.

I love this approach personally. Unfollowing almost everyone (except for a few I actually want to see) has it so I usually am OK with going on there now without feeling exasperated. I'm learning a foreign language so I began following people I don't even know who use that language so I can get practice reading it. I'm trying to make it work for my needs instead of completely checking in or out of the whole thing.

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