Facebook Disables Options, Floods News Feed
Facebook recently rolled out changes to its News Feed feature, making it controversial and difficult to use again.
- When your friends click “Like” on an item posted by someone who is a stranger to you, that story is now added to your News Feed.
- These “Like” stories now comprise the majority of News Feed items, flooding the home page with irrelevant images and branding.
- The settings that were designed to remove these stories no longer work.
When I log in to Facebook now, I am bombarded by photographs posted by people I have never heard of in my life. My friends are clicking the “Like” button on these photos, causing them to appear on my News Feed.
What this problem means for me is that even though my friends sometimes exercise good taste, we do not have the same taste. The images in my News Feed now frequently contain profanity, political messages, corporate branding, and other unwanted or randomly useless information.
And it’s not just me. The News Feed became such an annoyance yesterday that I wrote about it on my Facebook profile, which quickly received replies from friends having the same problem.
In the past, unwanted posts could be permanently blocked by adjusting the feed settings. Now Facebook has gone too far. They have broken all of the settings listed under “What types of updates” to receive from friends. Even though I have “Comments and Likes” turned off for many of my friends, I am still getting a flood of their unwanted activity updates.