11 reasons to delete your News Feed
On the 11th anniversary of Facebook’s News Feed, celebrate by throwing yours in the trash
When the News Feed launched on this day in 2006, people thought it was creepy as hell. Users hated it. Huge Facebook groups sprung up overnight to protest the new feature.
But Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t worried in the slightest. He could see the time Facebook users spent on his site skyrocketing, as they became addicted to this new thing that had everyone stalking each other by default.
11 years later, it’s clear that Zuckerberg pulled off the biggest heist in the history of human attention. Billions of hours are spent every year staring at the digital crack-cocaine he created, leading to billions of dollars earned and a $493 billion valuation.
I’ve just launched a feature in my Chrome extension, Nudge, which deletes your News Feed completely, so that you no longer see that never-ending list of posts whenever you log in to the social network (on any browser and device, not just Google Chrome). Here’s why you should use it.
1. You could save over a hundred hours a year
It seems absurd that a tiny tweak could have such a big impact on your life. But it really is that simple, because it really is that addictive. Get rid of your News Feed and you could instantly free up 20 minutes a day, or around 120 hours a year* — one waking week.
2. If your News Feed was a book, that book would suck
Humblebrags. Fake news. Rabbit holes that end with you frantically clicking through pictures of your ex’s dog’s wedding at 4am. Adverts. More adverts. Aziz Ansari said it best: if someone printed out your entire News Feed and made it into a book, that would be one truly shitty book. Deleting it feels blissful.
3. You keep everything that’s useful about Facebook
Facebook is an incredibly handy social tool, and many features (like Events, Messenger and Groups) are hard to live without — making deleting Facebook almost impossible. Deleting the News Feed strips away the most addictive part of Facebook while leaving the important parts.
4. You can still see all that same content
There’s definitely loads of fantastic stuff in your News Feed, especially posted by people you really care about. But that stuff doesn’t magically stop existing if you get rid of the feed.
At the moment, all that content is getting ‘pushed’ to you. How about instead, every time you feel the urge to see how your friends are doing, you ‘pull’ the information by going to their profile? The News Feed does exactly what it says it does: it feeds you content, when you should really be in control of feeding yourself.
So — excuse the false dichotomy — what would you rather be: a little baby, getting spoonfed by a giant corporation, or a big grown-up, choosing when and what to eat?
5. It doesn’t make you happy, according to experts
Facebook makes us unhappy. The more you use Facebook, the worse you feel. Facebook harms young people’s mental health, increasing feelings of inadequacy and anxiety. Facebook may harm health.
Some of these studies should be treated with a pinch of salt: correlation does not equal causation, and to properly test whether Facebook makes people unhappy is hard (also, none of those links focus only on the News Feed). But at the very least, the evidence suggests that the News Feed isn’t making people any happier.
6. It’s a bad place to read the news
People are increasingly reliant on the News Feed for their daily dose of actual news. This is worrying: it means that an opaque algorithm is choosing the news you read, based on things like whether an article is trending, or whether your friends recommended it, or whether you’re likely to click on it. Those are Facebook’s primary criteria — as opposed to making sure you read a good spread of views, are served articles by high quality journalists, and avoid clickbait and fake news.
Instead of having a non-transparent system do news discovery for you, delete your News Feed and head straight to news sites.
‘Hey, it’s just easier to get news from my News Feed!’ some might say. But easier is not better. In a world where even the concept of truth is under siege, it’s important to be in control of the sources of information in your life.
Going direct is also crucial for supporting your favourite newspapers, who are freaking out as they become dependent on Facebook for page views (and by extension, money).
7. If you’re not paying for it, you are the product
This is a well-known cliché in the tech world, and the News Feed is the textbook example. You are not Facebook’s customer. Facebook’s customers are companies that pay billions a year to advertise to you, and Facebook aims to keep you in the News Feed for as long as possible so that they can make more money from their real customers.
The thing being sold here is you. Your eyeballs make Facebook billions in advertising revenue every year. The News Feed is a way of packaging you up for sale. Deleting it is a way to opt out.
8. Spending our lives gazing at other people’s lives is weird
The News Feed now consumes more of humanity’s time, daily, than any other internet-era invention. We’re addicted to consuming other people’s lives — on Facebook, where it all started, but also on other apps like Snapchat and Instagram. If you’ll allow me to sound a little philosophical: is that what our time on earth is really for?
9. It’s super easy with my free Chrome extension
Facebook make it hard to get rid of your News Feed completely, since it’s where they make nearly all of their money. My Chrome extension, Nudge, uses Facebook’s back-end system to do it for you automatically. Install here, go to Facebook.com, wait a little and you’ll see ‘Unfollow everything’ appear at the bottom of the page. None of your friends will know that they’re being unfollowed — they’ll remain your friends — but after the unfollow feature finishes working, you’ll have nothing in your News Feed any more, on desktop and mobile**.
10. You can always ‘unfollow everything then refollow some’
Deleting your News Feed is a big step, and it doesn’t have to be forever. After you’ve unfollowed everything, you can refollow the people and things that you really care about. And here’s the thing. Doing that is far, far better than doing nothing at all and accepting your News Feed as it is, because you’ll be going to a clean slate and building upwards. At the moment, you’re stuck with the incredibly messy and shit slate Facebook gave you by default, when it opted you into seeing content from every person and thing you ever followed.
11. You’ll be able to spend more time on Instagram
Enjoy!
About Nudge
Nudge lets you delete your News Feed by unfollowing everything in it. It also tells you when you’re spending too long on addictive sites (‘You just spent 40 minutes on Buzzfeed’), when you’ve scrolled really far down (‘You just scrolled 20 screens down Twitter’), when you’ve compulsively gone back (‘You just quit Facebook 15 seconds ago’) and lets you switch websites off so that you have to drag a slider to access them again.
Get in touch: louis [at] nudgeware [dot] io
*There is no current information out there about how much time Facebook users spend on the News Feed. My estimate of 20 minutes a day for average users (120 hours a year) is based on 1) a recent figure of 35 minutes a day spent on Facebook (exc. Instagram and WhatsApp) 2) a not-so-recent figure of 27% time spent on the News Feed out of total time on Facebook 3) an upwards adjustment of 30% reflecting the fact that the News Feed is the cause of a large portion of time spent looking at profiles and photos, which respectively take up 21% and 17% of time spent on Facebook 4) assuming the previous figures, which are US only, apply roughly to the rest of the world. I would welcome better data or estimation here.
**In some cases, a few small fragments, like birthday reminders and suggested friends, may linger in your News Feed. You can hide these manually using the dropdown in the top-right of posts — so after a bit of extra clean-up, your News Feed should become fully blank.
