Facebook is showing me stuff I don't want to see

AyJaydee

Please excuse me for this rant, but it gets me really annoyed.

Is there someone who understands how Facebook works and can they please advise me on how to get control of what I see?

When I open FB, there are three separate issues with what is displayed:

1. The first is directly following (underneath) the top heading of “What’s on your mind”.

Next to my profile image, is a long horizontal list of other people and/or ‘stories’, with an ‘Add’ button underneath each. I do not know these people. Where did these come from?

2. Scrolling down, the next thing that I see is “People you may know”

A few of them are marked with ‘mutual friend’, these I expect. But the majority of them are complete strangers, usually from other countries, in different social demographics. Does FB really think that I might know someone where the only thing we have in common is that we happen to live on the same planet!!! I delete them, and another load appears the next day.

3. Then continuing to scroll down, I get post after post from people and organisations that I have no interest in. No matter what I do here with selecting the icons in the top right, ‘…’ or ‘X’, neither one gives me to option to say “No I don’t want to see this”. The best available option is to freeze so-n-so for 30 days, but there’s still another 90 billion people on the planet and all of them want me to see their trashy posting!

It was succinctly put on a recent Panorama program where two young people were challenged to live without their phones for a week. One person said, “I don’t want to see this stuff and keep telling them, but they don’t respect my wishes because it keeps coming back”.

I have tried searching around my settings, but there’s nothing that remotely resembles a ‘No Thank you’. I am seriously considering unsubscribing myself (if that is possible), because this is getting annoying. I only joined FB to keep in contact with my family, but it has become so overloaded with all this junk, that it’s becoming close to unworkable for me.

Does anyone know how to stop all this being shown? Thank you.

PHK

Menu>Feeds>Friends

prowla

FB's "AI" is pretty rubbish; you just have to click on something and suddenly you get inundated with a load of related stuff on your feed.

I never look at "Reels" now, because I end up with completely unrelated junk being chucked at me.

They tend to add unrelated ads whenever you search for something too.

Oftentimes when I tap on the "X" to remove an item from search results it takes me to it instead, so I guess that registers as me showing an interest and triggers more of the same.

I guess they need to make their money somehow.

Neil_Jones

The problem with Facebook is its designed to only be of interest/use if you follow a load of groups and channels and have more friends on it anybody would have in real life.  In theory you can have 5000 "friends" on Facebook.  In reality how many people are you going to know and how many groups are you going to actively partake in offline?

hugheskevi

Depending on how you access it, you may find the browser add-on 'Social Fixer for Facebook' helpful - you can customise exactly what is shown in the feed, which parts of the display are shown, etc.

chrisw

If you go in settings and privacy, you can set your preferences, clear ads you might have clicked on and hide some interest topics. However, it won't reduce the amount you receive, it will just start filling up with other random ads and topics.

im afraid it's something you either put up with or don't use Facebook.

flaneurs_lobster

I think you may be forgetting how Facebook makes it's shareholders very rich - it's sole purpose is to put as much stuff past your eyeballs as possible.

If along the way it helps some people keep in touch then that's a fortunate by-product of the main purpose of shifting content into your brain.

HumberFlyer

If you are using a PC.... this works a treat for loads of rubbish on FB https://www.fbpurity.com/

daveyjp

I was on Twitter for years mainly to follow people posting on subjects which interested me and it was a useful resource on occasion.

Over the last few months the feed was 90% nonsense, items I wasn't interested in, dodgy links, adult material, adverts and reposts supposedly from those I followed or reposts of their posts from years ago, sometimes dozens of them.

I deleted it about a month ago.

droopsnoot

HumberFlyer said:

If you are using a PC.... this works a treat for loads of rubbish on FB https://www.fbpurity.com/

I was about to post the same thing, it certainly improves matters, but a visit to Facebook is still an exercise in frustration. People and companies you're not interested in, posts in a seemingly random sequence, stuff you catch a glimpse of and can never find again. I envy those who steadfastly refuse to go on it. 

Hoenir

In principle a great idea. Commercialism (as usual) makes it a complete waste of time.