Have you felt a bit isolated by an unusually quiet Facebook feed recently?
Last week, I was that person, posting a picture of tumbleweed and asking where all my Facebook friends had gone. The same small percentage of contacts were showing up in my feed, lending the impression the world up and left Facebook for a cooler online pursuit. (Or even more frightening- everyone else, perhaps, was busy with real life activities to which I hadn’t been invited!)
My bestie in high school agreed, saying his feed was lame, too. My college roommate theorized everyone was “over” Facebook. Four message board friends said the dearth helped them focus on work. A girl two grades under me in high school made cricket noises. But no one seemed to be aware of the fact Facebook has yet again dicked around with settings to an undesirable end, adding a new default to only show posts from people with whom you interact the most.
From a social networking setting, and indeed, Facebook’s own previous behaviors, this doesn’t make too much sense. (For instance, it used to prompt you to “write on (their) wall” if someone hadn’t logged in in a while.) If you’re already interacting with a person or page, you don’t need a lot of reminders to do so. Discouraging more diverse friend-group interactions seems like it would create less interest in Facebooking overall, wouldn’t it?
If you, like most people, prefer to see your un-hid friends equally, the fix to this is relatively easy. If you scroll to the bottom of your newsfeed, eventually you will see a little blue box with a link to “Edit Options.” (You kind of have to race the feed to not update at this point, because it will try to keep displaying posts.) Click the link, and the dialog box will offer you two selections. The default is now “Friends and pages you interact with most.” Click the other selection- “All your friends and pages.”
Now refresh your feed, and be shocked at all the content you were missing previously! Have you noticed the new settings silencing your Facebook updates? Did you miss your less-vocal friends while they were gone?
