Here’s How Facebook Is Using You To Irritate Your Friends

Ads are a necessary evil on Facebook. But you can help make them less annoying, with a few tactics worked out by Lifehacker.

Lifehacker sat down and analyzed everything that Facebook does to make you pesky, and, well, there’s quite a lot of it. As they point out, Facebook’s relentless plugging to your friends of stuff you “like” is what screws up your feed, even if you set it to “most recent.”

We’re not talking about your own status updates, photos, or anything you post to Facebook yourself—just the way you interact with other pages, groups, and people on Facebook. It’s one thing if your news feed is full of baby pictures from your old high school friends—it’s another thing when every post you like from a group you follow ends up in all of your friends’ news feeds without you knowing or being able to control who sees it.

The entire post gets into the nitty-gritty of what Facebook does and why. You might have seen this in action earlier in the month, when reviews of a banana slicer on Amazon just seemingly would not die in your Feed. That’s because Amazon was paying to promote those posts.

So, how do you stop it?

The short answer is limit your Likes to stuff you genuinely enjoy, and avoid products where possible. They also recommend starting a Like Profile, basically a Facebook where you have no friends and all you do is Like stuff, thus getting the deals and coupons and updates that would otherwise not be yours.

Either way, if we all do this, it’ll make Facebook less annoying, and Facebook earnings calls far more entertaining. And both are noble goals.