Facebook is boring, it used to be great now it’s boring. I used to have 200 friends now I have 1500. There is no way I know 1500 people. Draconian measures must be taken to save my relationship with the social network. The unfriend button is my path to making Facebook an enjoyable experience once again.
Despite Facebook’s very best algorithms my feed is mostly posts I don’t want to see. Let me clarify what posts I don’t want to see means;
- Anything from Upworthy
- Posts about dead dogs
- Injured dogs
- Mistreated dogs
- Dogs that need to be adopted
- Dogs with skin diseases that nobody loves
- Sick cats
- Dead cats
- Cats that need adoption
- Anything about people in China eating cats
- Anything from the RSPCA, PETA or other animal rights organisation
- Anything from Upworthy
- Dead babies
- Abortion
- Sick babies
- Charities that help sick babies
- Monoamniotic twin babies born holding hands but covered in blood and all kinds of other grossness
- Anything baby at all unless it’s your beautiful newborn baby (in that case try to take a decent photo, remember lighting is everything)
- Politics
- Any quiz taken on Buzzfeed that lets you know what character on Game of Thrones you’d be, or what kind of house you live in or any fucking quiz from Buzzfeed
- Anything at all from Buzzfeed
- Anything from Upworthy
- Anything that includes the phrase ‘and what happened next will amaze you’
- News that’s older than 72 hours. Just cause it’s new to you doesn’t mean anyone cares
- Sports
- Anything from Upworthy (seriously)
What that leaves is simply the lives of the people I am friends with. What are you up to? Make something cool recently? Oh congrats! you got engaged, kids look great, cool pictures from the party, WOW you got accepted, a new job!, a new car!, a new boyfriend!, I hadn’t realised you were gay, great pictures, that’s a nice one too!, your trip to the Galapagos looks incredible. I care, please share you life. That’s why I like Facebook it lets me keep up with my friend’s lives especially the ones I might not otherwise have any access to.
I defriend people who share things I am not interested in. It makes me hate the platform. It’s like adding salt to lemonade; the entire glass tastes like shit.
Facebook is different for everyone, some value sharing things I find unsavory (this is an assumption, why else would so many people share so much garbage). If that’s your thing that’s cool. I choose to unfriend you, if we are actual friends IRL then we shall remain so, I just don’t want to see your shares anymore — yes I know I can unfollow, I’m not interested. If you don’t share my sentiment I understand entirely and I highly recommend and encourage you to Unfriend me, I won’t take it personally.
Casey Neistat is a New York-based filmmaker. He is the writer, director, editor, and star of the series The Neistat Brothers on HBO and won the John Cassavetes Award at the 2012 Independent Spirit Awards for producing the film Daddy Long Legs. His main body of work consists of dozens of short films he has released exclusively on the Internet, including regular contributions to the New York Times critically acclaimed Op-Doc series. His online films have been viewed over 60,000,000 times in the last 3 years.
You can (and should!) follow Casey on Twitter and Instagram. You can also head here for his Instagram tutorial, which is the best one out there by a mile.
Image by Oli Dunkley under Creative Commons licence