A couple of weeks ago, there were two stories circulating all over social media, both having to do with the “Like” button on Facebook. The first was Mat Honan, a writer from Wired Magazine who decided to “Like” everything on Facebook, and then there was Elan Morgan, a writer who decided to quit liking things on Facebook and then wrote about it on Medium.com. Both writers documented how their Facebook feed changed, for the good and for the bad, and how those changes affected them personally. The former writer found himself being forced to like things he really didn’t like. And the latter writer found herself having to fight her Pavlovian response to “Like” things that she normally just would have clicked on.
The part of the latter article that caught my eye was this notion that Facebook’s algorithm is set up to cull advertisers and sponsored content based on what you “Like,” be it a brand or your friend’s latest back-to-school photo. While I love me my Facebook, I didn’t like that my so-called personal relationships on social media (is that an oxymoron?) might affect the Facebook I experienced.
A couple of Facebook algorithms ago, I’d set up lists for my family, people I knew in high school, people who live in my town now, and my writer buddies, just so that if Facebook wouldn’t allow those folks to show up organically in my feed, I could click over to my list and “check in” with them. That worked for awhile, until those feeds became 90% This Person Liked That Brand and 10% “Hey, my kid lost his first tooth!”
When Elan Morgan’s piece posted on August 13, I decided that I, too, would stop liking things on Facebook for the rest of August and see what happened. Those 18 days both flew by and dragged on.
Like Morgan I had to resist the urge just to click “Like” to show my approval of things people were posting. It actually made me stop and think about how I really felt about certain posts and whether I really wanted to interact with the person who had posted something that made me stop scrolling. In instances where I did want to let them know I liked what they had posted, I posted a comment.
“What a wonderful gift you gave your mother” I posted in response to a friend talking about arranging for a reunion between her 92 year old mother and her 96 year old sister.
“That looks awesome,” I commented on a friend’s picture of her hanging out on a hammock, reading a book.
“So awesome,” I wrote about a friend showing the fish that her young neighbor caught with her Barbie fishing pole.
In the past I would have just clicked “Like.” So maybe “awesome” is the new “like” for me, but posting a comment felt like a more genuine interaction.
In addition to feeling more connected to my Facebook friends, I noticed that, like Morgan, my Facebook feed changed for the better. Sure, I could count on the third or fourth item in my feed to be an advertisement of some sort–usually based on some website where I’d visited lately, thank you cookies–but overall my feed contained more “real” posts from my friends. And I started seeing friends whose posts hadn’t showed up in my Facebook feed (or on those lists that I’d created) for months. Maybe they hadn’t been posting a lot. Or maybe because of what I had been liking on Facebook, Facebook determined that those friends and what they were posting wasn’t relevant to what I should be reading.
The one drawback to not clicking “Like” on anything on Facebook during this whole time was missing out on deals at retailers and restaurants I hadn’t previously liked. As you know from this piece I wrote over on Parade.com, about Labor Day freebies and deals, you had to “Like” certain brands in order to get a coupon for their holiday giveaway.
Have you ever thought about making a conscious decision about how you interact on Facebook to see how it might change the Facebook you see? If not, you may want to give it a try.
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The post What Happened When I Quit Liking Things on Facebook appeared first on Suddenly Frugal Blog.