“Facebook has a big problem”, the tech media breathlessly cries. Despite using it every day, I’m not a fan of Facebook, and so am drawn to these articles like a moth to a flame. Let’s all enjoy guilt-free schadenfreude at the expense of a billion-dollar business! So, what’s Facebook’s problem this week? People are sharing more web pages and news stories, but fewer “personal stories”—plain status updates that relate to their lives.

A while back I complained of a slightly different problem: a lack of customisability of the news feed:

Does anyone know if there are secret Facebook settings to customise the news feed? Lately it's been 90% stuff I don't care about:
  • $friend liked $never-heard-of-you's photo
  • $friend shared $clickbait-article
  • $friend is going to $event-miles-away
All I really want to see is real status updates!

In essence, I was fed up of every day scrolling past a wall of this:

It turns out that Facebook’s controls for the news feed are pretty terrible. If a friend of mine comments on a non-friend’s post, “likes” it, or worst of all “reacts to” it, that’s automatically considered newsworthy for me. Facebook offers no way to customise the feed to remove these kind of posts.

You can, however, choose to hide all posts from certain people, including those not on your friends list. So based on the advice I received, I started “hiding all from” everyone I didn’t recognise who appeared in my news feed.

I’ve done this almost every day for the last couple of weeks, and in a way, it has been very successful. Almost all the strangers’ profile pic changes and distant events have gone, there’s fewer clickbait posts and memes, and mercifully almost no Minions at all.

But what’s left?

Not much.

The media was right, at least as it pertains to my Facebook friends. What remains after you’ve removed all the crap is real status updates—from about five people. Out of 200-odd friends, very few are actually posting status updates and pictures. Mostly of their kids, because I’ve reached that age. The rest of my friends either largely share stuff I didn’t care about, so I don’t see them any more, or they post so rarely that they’re drowned out by the wall of baby photos.

Although Facebook was our LiveJournal replacement, the place we went to stay in touch with our friends’ lives once we left university for our far-flung pockets of adulthood, it looks like for us that age of constant sharing may be on the decline.

I’m not sure if I will be happy or sad to see it go.