So much to catch up on, you guys!
If you read me on Facebook you’ll know that I am just back from visiting Ken in Germany. There was cake and there were doggies and there was the Englischer Garten (English Garden – did you guess?) and so many things. And one of the things was a week long conversation about where we are going in our virtual lives. Here’s his take on the convo Having Cake and Discussing Which Direction We’re All Going
Since I got back we’ve been Skyping and continuing the conversation. There’s an element of collaboration as well, since in the intervening time I went to the Future of Text conference here in London which he’d wanted to come over for but couldn’t and then he hooked me up with Frode Hegland via Facebook and I got an invite, so we have been hooching up some sort of a text on that, which is still in the oven.
On the hot plate, though, is a slice of netiquette that he asked me to blog about because he thought it was interesting. In a kind of dry way, but it makes my fb experience better, and I get to see more of my friends’ posts there because of it. I’ve done it so often now it was kind of hard to find an example I could use, but here’s one which will serve as an example.
What I’ve actually done is, rather than hiding friends or letting fb drop them for me, which I don’t want to do, I just hide some of the stuff that people share. Not that I never want to know which US state I should live in, just that I have done those quizzes a million times and I now never ever see them in my feed, thus freeing me to enjoy the other content that people who I’m talking to are sharing without having to see the quizzes I’m not interested in, and at the same time, because of that, seeing more content that I do want to see.
So, see how, for instance, Shaun has shared a thing from Comedy 103.1 and say there was a lot of their content in my feed and I wasn’t interested in seeing any of it, rather than stop seeing Shaun and all of his posts I get to just hide all from Comedy 103.1.
In reality, I can’t remember if I have ever seen any Comedy 103.1 material before, or whether it would clutter up my feed if I let it, but if I wanted to, as I did with the interminable quizzes, I could just scroll down and hide them instead of hiding Shaun.
Given that FB has decided to do friend culling for us with their evil algorithms, it’s nice to be able to exert some control beyond installing Adblock and making sure notifications are ON for specific friends, rather than actually creating groups, which, thus far at any rate, I haven’t been interested in doing.
So that was that.
Here’s a picture of Ken and his dogs in front of a Peace Monument.
I have so many photos from the trip, and that’s another thing I’m thinking about. I’m kind of reassessing my entire virtual presence. Where should I post my photos? Should I go the Instagram way? I do have an account, it’s just that it’s only got two pictures in it so far. Should I post photos in tumblr, even though the people I follow are artists or art curators? I just don’t know right now. It’s a thing I have to think about.
So yeah, this is a place holder to tell you I am going to tell you about the Future of Text soon, but not right now, there are photos and thoughts, so many thoughts, from Germany. I’m pretty sure there are other things as well, but I’ve had rather a roller coaster health horror since I got back and I’m only now having a moment to reflect, and I’m on some new medication, which seems to be helping, but for now it’s making me a bit stoned, too.
So, that.
Ach! Language! So much language stuff. And music. The cakes, I told you about the cakes. Talking of that sort of thing, if you follow this blog in Facebook through the button there you really only get the blog, I don’t put incidental stuff there. Go ahead and friend me if you want that sort of ephemera – I’m Elaine Axten, pretty easy to find, not many of us to the pound.
Elaine Axten - Writer 
All of this is good. The reason I wanted you to share this very clear explanation of how to filter out certain quizzes or games from a Facebook wall is that I often hear people complaining about this very thing.
Sadly people leave their privacy settings the way they are or neglect to change settings, because they’ve never done it before and can’t be arsed to learn something new.
Thanks for this. We should round this explanation up with other LifeHack-type stuff and have it in one easy to find location.
It’s as much a bodge as anything. I know perfectly well that you can make filters on Facebook, but it’s never seemed simple, and there would be too many people to herd around. On Livejournal filters were a simple matter, easy to implement and worth doing for both reading and writing purposes. I know some people do it on fb, but it’s seemed to be a drag to me, this way you can make adjustments ‘on the fly’.
I don’t get as many options a this – only Save ‘{title]’, Turn on Notifications’ and ‘I don’ like this post’. The last one takes me to 3 options for why I don’t like it: ‘It’s annoying or not interesting’, ‘I don’t think it should be on Facebook’, and ‘It’s spam’. How can I get what you’ve got? [craving]
Yeah, the option to tell them ‘why’ is never worth clicking on.
Are you looking at fb on a device rather than a laptop or desktop? There are more restrictions there, though the choices you make when you are on a bigger computer should be good for when you go back on your phone or tablet.
They’re almost always the same everywhere I look – I must have made some seemingly unrelated plane which has prevented me from being as selective in what I hide as I’d prefer. On rechecking, I’ve found one re-share that allowed me to hide anything from the originating site, but everything that my friends have shared themselves gives me only the draconian options I list. My blood’s up now – more research needed
Yeah, it’s just a sort of hack, where, if people are posting a lot from a site you don’t want to see anything from you can get rid of that quite easily.
Not much you can do about your friends who share stuff they have uploaded themselves. Time was when you could choose to see less of someone without dumping them completely. As far as I can see you can only get more of someone you want to see all of – by ticking ‘get notifications’ on their page. I suppose they think by controlling your feed Facebook gives you a smoother experience, but I preferred it when you could turn down the dial without getting rid of someone completely. I think they are a bit too into what they can do on their end, forgetting that people do like to control their environments.
I saw a study once where psychologists put up a thermostat in an office which wasn’t attached to anything. The conclusion of the study was that people even just believing they had some control were happier in their workplace.
I thought I’d typed “change” not “plane”. I wasn’t including supernatural explanations in my cogitations.