Unfollow non-friends to defeat clickbaiters

It's easy:

1. Notice a non-friend in your Facebook news feed.
2. Click the top-right of the post and select the option to "unfollow" that entity.
3. Repeat until Facebook is actually a place to keep in touch with your friends again.

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Clickbait: Just say No

For the last decade there's been an explosion of entities competing for consumer attention. Time spent on TV, movies, and video games has been funneled to the web, to YouTube videos, and now to Facebook.

The Facebook News Feed is one of 2014's most effective broadcast channels. The effect of this is that Facebook isn't about helping you keep in touch with friends any more: it's about selling your attention to the highest bidder.*

Go to your news feed now and just start scrolling. How many updates are from your friends vs. news sources, comedy sites, celebrities, tabloids, or other corporate entities? Kind of sobering, isn't it?

Facebook wants your eyeballs. They will work overtime to keep them. They will show you what you're most likely to interact with, all by default. And maybe this is what you want. But maybe it isn't.

I get my news and comedy from RSS sources I trust (e.g. Ars Technica, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal). There are some sources where I want to read each post. I don't need to see the same stuff in Feedly and in Facebook, because when I go on Facebook it's to get in touch with friends, not to get distracted by clickbait and ragemongers.

We live in a post-boredom society. There are times I don't want to do anything, there are times I want to veg out, but there are no times when there is nothing to consume or nothing to do. One of the worst ways to spend a day is in all consumption and no doing. I don't go to Facebook because I'm bored. I go to Facebook to get in touch with friends, to broadcast news and thoughts to friends, to see what's going on with people far away, to send messages, and to plan events. Not to be another pair of eyeballs for BuzzFeed and HuffPo.

*These bids have two axes. One axis is ad dollars paid to Facebook, but the more significant axis of the bid is research into how to make people click on a link. If you've never spent more time on a clicked article than the article was worth, feel free to ignore this post.