[dottenad]

I just found News Feed Eradicator the other day and it has changed my Facebook habits drastically. It lets you use all of the useful features of FB (messages, groups, pages, etc.) and replaces the newsfeed with a quote about procrastination or productivity. 10/10 would recommend - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicat...

[mrchess]

I used this for a while but noticed it greatly slowed down my Facebook in general. Ended up uninstalling it after a few days. Wish they had a lighter weight one.

[ldd]

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.

[georgemcbay]

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.

[firebones]

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.

[jupiter90000]

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.

[enraged_camel]

It seems to me that the parent would still miss out on what he would like to see the most: pictures of his extended family's (cousins and niece) daily life. The nice thing about the News Feed is that it shows them to you unprompted. Otherwise you'd have to go into each and every single profile and check to see if they have posted anything.

Don't get me wrong, I love the News Feed Eradicator, but it doesn't always change the "Facebook experience" for the better.