Facebook Just Maximised Your Ability To Be A Huge Creep

Facebook Just Maximised Your Ability To Be A Huge Creep

Facebook’s most recent update gives us more control over what shows up in News Feed, which means we all just got a terrific way to maintain unhealthily close tabs on friends, crushes, enemies and racist acquaintances.

The new News Feed controls let you pick a squad of Facebook friends and show you every single one of their posts, kind of like MySpace’s Top Friends feature, except nobody can see it but you, and there’s no limit on how many people you choose.

It pulls every post and status update they write to the top of your Newsfeed whenever you sign on, ensuring that you will never again suffer the indignity of not knowing when the college friend you secretly desperately want to bone goes on a trip to Tulum, Mexico.

Facebook uses an algorithm to curate what we see on our News Feed, which is one of the reasons why News Feed is broken — it doesn’t always do a great job of predicting whose posts we want. Turns out Facebook’s answer is to just let us do it. This is a corrective measure, a step further than the “Close Friend” starring system. It’s also a better system than those “Close Friend” stars, which send push notifications every time your chosen crew does anything, which is super annoying.

But today is one of those 2-for 1 feature specials because now Facebook also lets you look at a grid of everyone you’ve unfollowed. It’s billed as an opportunity to reconnect but come on, you unfollow people for a reason, and it’s not to reconnect later. It’s because they suck. Let’s just consider this a feature designed to let us gloat over those we’ve surreptitiously cast aside.

The update rolls out to iOS today, and will be available on desktop and Android in the next few weeks.

Happy creeping, you beautiful weirdos.


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