Facebook sharing has gotten out of hand. Gone are the days when we shared what we wanted to share rather than having everything we read, watch, listen to, or simply open pop up on our friends’ feed.
I am deleting every single app I have that can be classified as “obnoxious” (in that it posts to my wall or any other aspects of Facebook without my explicit intention to do so). It was in reading this nice little article on CNET that I realized the truth and started understanding why I have been using Facebook less and less lately.
It bugs the heck out of me. I used to see what I want to see. Now I see what Facebook and app developers want me to see. My friends are bugging me and I am pretty sure that at least half of them don’t even realize they’re doing it.
Open Graph is ruining sharing. That’s the premise of the CNET article and it makes sense. I will no longer be part of the problem. You shouldn’t either.
Go to your Apps. Remove any of the ones that you don’t want to use. If it’s a posting or sharing app, delete it. Seamless sharing is not real sharing. It’s oversharing. It’s irrelevent sharing. If you want to share something, share it. Don’t let an app tell your world every move you’re making. Nobody cares. “Proactive sharing” makes more sense. Have we grown so lazy that we need an app to tell our story to the world? Can’t we take the extra step to push a button when there’s something truly interesting that we want to share?
Does anyone really care what you’re listening to right now or what article you just read?
No. If the song, video, picture, or story was interesting enough, you would have proactively posted it to your wall. Those are the things we want to see.
Delete away.
Spread the word.
Until you can get all of your friends to do the same thing (by sharing this story, for instance) you can always hide the apps and the stories themselves:
About JD Rucker
Why don’t you just hide what you don’t want to see? If you know how to use Facebook it’s great. They make it very easy to pick and choose what you want to see and what you want to share. If someone wants to share something you don’t want to see just hide it. On your screenshot it says right there, “Hide all by Yahoo!”
Can definitely sympathize! The personalization of content is becoming overwhelming and unnecessary!
I killed a bunch of apps a few weeks ago. Haven’t missed ‘em. I think there’s definitely going to be a push back…
Anyone else think this is sorta the start of that same downward spiral MySpace went through after everyone started “modding” their profiles? Customization is fine, but after a while too many choices leads to overwhelmed users and abandonment.
I deactivated my whole FB account for a couple of weeks and went to using Twitter and Google+ exclusively. When I realized I didn’t miss FB AT ALL, I went back it and set it to delete my account entirely. Google+ is so much cleaner; it reminds me of FB before it became the over-apped, over-sharing monstrosity it is now.
Spammy and pointless apps are starting to dominate the social web – however, I hope the intelligence of the community will put an end to this.