If you social feed sucks, blame yourself

facepalm-at-pc

Introduction

I hear many times statements like:

People share stupid stuff, fake news and bullshits I’m not interested in.
I don’t use <social> (usually Facebook) anymore because it’s full of crap content.

Those who say these phrases are blaming others for something they actually decided themself. If you decided to follow or to be friend with someone, it’s your fault in the first place. You cannot change the opinion of the people around you simply sharing a super scientific bulletproof article you just found, it’s more complex than that.

The source of crap

Let’s suppose we are considering Facebook as your (currently crap) social feed. What is the source of the crap? Probably hundreds of people that you are friend with and you barely know. Why are you still friend with them? Just unfriend them all. “But they are friends!”. Wrong, they are not friends, they are just labelled as “friend”, but let me just remind you what is the real meaning of “friend”:

A friend is someone who you know well and who you can trust.

Cambridge Dictionary

It’s self explanatory that someone that you barely know and you can’t trust cannot be your friend, it’s, in fact, the opposite of the definition of friend.

The easy solution

Next time you visit your social feed and you notice a crap content, ask yourself: “why the hell I’m friend with this person?”. If you can’t answer, just get rid of them right away. You will probably notice that some crap content come from some Pages too. Same question: “why I’m still following them”? You know the drill by now.
Iterate this for every crap content you notice and you are going to have a nice feed again. I say again because in the past you had a nice feed and you remember it. Why we used to have a nice feed? What has changed? It’s changed that you now have 10x more people/pages that you follow and you have never cleaned up that list. Begin doing some cleaning and you’ll notice the difference immediately.

One last thing: if you follow News pages on Facebook, just don’t. You can get informed in many other better ways.