May I offer some quick advice to make Facebook not suck as much?

[backscatter712]

Lately, I've been revising the way I do Facebook, as my newsfeed has become hopelessly cluttered with advertisements, right-wing douchebags, automated posts from Farmville players, etc. Here's what I've done to deal with that.

1. Install Social Fixer ( http://socialfixer.com/ ). It's a browser plugin, available for most major browsers except Internet Explorer. It automatically filters out the Farmville stuff, lets you set up your own filters, and has about twenty million features for improving your Facebook experience.

2. Work your lists. Group your friends into lists. Specifically, I just created a new friend list called Dunbar's Circle, named after Dunbar's Number ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number ), which describes a theoretical cognitive limit in the human brain that limits the number of meaningful relationships a person can maintain to about 150-200 people. So, I cap the number of people in Dunbar's Circle to 200, I require that people I put on this list be actual human beings that I've met and interacted with in meat-space, and that I have some reason or motivation to invest my social energy with them.)

3. Use your Restricted List. Set your status updates to be visible to Friends Except Restricted, and if you're dealing with some jerkass, say a relative, that you'd like to unfriend, but can't without causing a shitstorm, put him there. He won't know, and he won't see your status updates, and you can keep him out of the loop as to what you're posting on Facebook.

It doesn't solve all the problems, and I'm sure Zuckerberg will come up with creative new ways to make Facebook suck so he can make money, but this helps make the place more tolerable, and more useful for keeping up with friends and family.

[virgogal]

1. What is meat-space? I'm not too familiar with the ups and downs of Facebook.

[backscatter712]

4. Off the Internet.

In other words, the real world, not the Matrix.

When you're walking around in your meat-body and interacting with others the old fashioned way.

[virgogal]

8. Thank you !

[Make7]

2. What the hell is "Facebook"? ( n/t )

[scarletwoman]

3. Facebook doesn't suck at all for me.

Since I refuse to ever join it.

I keep "up with friends and family" by actually, you know, talking to them.

[backscatter712]

6. I like Google+ better myself...

Except the network effect problem - It's hard for a social networking site to be useful if none of your friends is on it. Everyone's on Facebook despite its suckage, and only a few friends are on Google+ as of yet.

Diaspora looks even more promising as far as social-networking that doesn't suck, but still has the problem of getting people to migrate over.

[Posteritatis]

9. I sorta like how G+ ended up with my crowd

The more technical and academic-minded people I know tended to end up over there, and the format's more suited to things with paragraph breaks, so it's not just an FB alternative to me as much as it's a separate place with a separate purpose. I'm okay with that.

[abelenkpe]

5. K&R Thank you!

I really do need to do the groups thing.

Too late on unfriending family though.

[Posteritatis]

7. The site became much less annoying for me when I spent the time to learn the filters

Lets me dodge stuff I'm not in the mood to see, post things a bit more comfortably without worrying about some reactions, yadda yadda.

It means I'm not one of those people making all public posts wondering why people three degrees of separation from them are showing up to lecture them on their posts. ;P

[green for victory]

10. How to make farcebook not suck at all- delete your account

Here's how to keep SuckerBerg's track bots out of your life completely.

Copy and Paste the following into the Hosts file after 127.0.0.1 localhost
# Block Facebook
127.0.0.1 www.facebook.com
127.0.0.1 facebook.com
127.0.0.1 static.ak.fbcdn.net
127.0.0.1 www.static.ak.fbcdn.net
127.0.0.1 login.facebook.com
127.0.0.1 www.login.facebook.com
127.0.0.1 fbcdn.net
127.0.0.1 www.fbcdn.net
127.0.0.1 fbcdn.com
127.0.0.1 www.fbcdn.com
127.0.0.1 static.ak.connect.facebook.com
127.0.0.1 www.static.ak.connect.facebook.com

see what data farcebook collects on YOU

http://europe-v-facebook.org/EN/Data_Pool/data_pool.html



Max Schrems shows the data collected on him after 1 year of "membership".
Every person in the EU has the right to access all the data that a company is holding about him/her. We don't have laws like this in the US because most people can't concentrate on one topic long enough to understand the concept.