Top Stories

The default setting of your news feed is always set to show youTop Stories.  Top Stories have the most comments, and often times can be long running posts that have been shared publicly or are connected to a photo.

As the algorithm tries to show me posts on my news feed, I find some stragglers that missed the unfollow process.  I have no idea when I became friends with these people, they are bottom of the barrel unfamiliar.   So to keep up the experiment, I go to their page and unfollow them.  Coicidently I am not seeing their posts directly, I am seeing them tagged in posts, posted by people that are not in my friends list.  I have the option of  both unfollowing the person who was tagged, and silencing the person who posted, even if they aren’t my friend.

In the process I found a feature I hadn’t seen before.  “What you have in common.”  When I go to someones page, who is on my friends list, and navigate to their list of friends on the left hand side of the screen, there is a link to see what I have in common with the friends of that friend.  So far as I can tell, this is just more encouragement to “collect friends”, and to connect with people you don’t know, further growing “THE NETWORK”.

I admit, I have been a friend collector.  My posts are mainly public; I had a youtube channel when I started FB, and this blog page.  I get random friend requests on occasion.  (I vet them on how many friends they have, how many we have in common, and whether or not the profile appears legit, or if it looks like it is a fake account.) If it looks legit to me,  I accept them into my fold.  I rarely have any problems with trolls or shills.  This isn’t the case for everyone, however.  In my opinion, always vet the people sending friend requests.  I know a few men who collect hot girl friends on FB… but most of those hot girls, look to have fake accounts.  Who knows who is on the other side of the screen, in those scenarios.  It’s your page, do what you want, but I suggest being wary of strangers.

Popular across Facebook, Posts Aggregated by  FB

My News Feed is looking pretty empty in the first 24 hours.  Facebook doesn’t want me to be too bored, and it wants me on their site.  So a post pops up about sloths that I commented on months ago, and has millions of views.  Since I have cleared out my feed, and the video is still circulating and actively gaining comments, I begin to get all the notifications of comments on this publicly trending video.  I promptly turn off notifications for that post.

Posts on my News Feed from the last 24 hours

My News Feed includes the posts that I have made in the last 24 hours, and my “Memories from this day”, and not much else.  I can scroll about a page and a half worth of content which consists of my posts, an advertisement, and the ” People you may know” feature (which appears three times and takes up much of that page and a half of scrolling) … again more encouragement to collect friends, or stumble upon some one you knew or recognize from some other time in your life. I tried to turn off this feature, but there is no option to do that at this time.

A Fair Experiment

A couple of ad posts from the sales sites that I didn’t unfollow, come up when I refresh the page.  I decided I want this experiment to be really fair across the board and so I  turned off notifications for those pages , as well as unfollowed the few local groups I thought about keeping live on my feed.

 Unanswered Friend Requests

Upon refreshing the page again, I now see a feature, similar to the People You May Know, which is the unanswered friend requests.  I have had a few people sitting in there for quite some time.  FB really wants me to remember they are sitting in there, but I am going to let them sit longer.  All of them are men, and I don’t know any of them personally.  I reason that since most of my content is public, they can see what everyone else does, and if they are following me, they are getting active updates.  There is no added value for me to add them as friends at this point.

Refresh to Recent Stories

I always prefer to have the Recent Stories vs Top Stories in my News Feed.  I  like those fresh posts that haven’t been commented on yet.  So I go ahead and refresh the page to Recent stories…. nothing is coming up, except my own posts from the last 24 hours and the options to make more friends.  I also get a suggested ” Stories you May Like”, which appears to be stuff that your friends liked that was viral.  There is an option to hide that feature, so I hide it.

Facebook Memories

I am still getting notifications for posts that I have commented on.  When you comment on a post, you automatically “follow” it, and all the responses.  If you don’t  actively “turn off notifications for this post” it can pop up on your feed again even though the post was  from 6 years ago because someone re-posted it from their memories, or for instance, a friend comments on an old picture.  This could be because a new friend decided to commented on old content while facestalking/ facequistition.

Bands

I don’t recall unfollowing any bands that I may have liked.  They pop up if there is an update.  Let’s just say, I haven’t thought about Goldfrappe in awhile.   I am unfollowing the bands as they pop up.

What I hope happens

I am hoping that after a week or so, that I start getting posts in my news feed again… but I am hoping for some relevance, and not just a mishmash of garbage.   I am hoping my real friends rise to the top like a fine cream.  Only time will tell.