Getting the Memes Out of My Facebook News Feed?

November 1, 2012 1:11 PM

Is there a way one can prevent people sharing a Facebook page's photos on your newsfeed -- either using Facebook's native settings or a Firefox extension or Greasemonkey userscript? I'm trying to weed out the memes and sassy e-cards. Can I block the pages like I would a person?

Okay, Facebook question time. I hate these … *sigh*

I have a few Facebook friends who share photos from pages that are annoyingly named. These “photos” are usually fairly stupid memes, Photoshopped e-cards, etc.

I’d like to preserve the friendship, but filter out those specific posts. It should be possible, I imagine – it’s a specific type of thing, it’s when they are sharing someone else’s “photographs”. Even moreover, it’s usually when they’re sharing photographs off a page, not a person.

These pages are usually something like:

... shared Reading someone's status and thinking 'oh shut the fuck up.''s photo.
... shared I don't care what you think's photo.
... shared Rottenecards's photo.

I can’t quite figure out if there’s a way I can “block” these pages like I would a person. Or if there’s a way I can prevent this specific person’s shared photos from turning up in my news feed without blocking all their other stuff.

Defriending the person's a last resort, and likely one I might not even take.

posted by WCityMike to computers & internet (8 answers total)

you can "hide" everything by that person and just visit his/her page when you need an update on what they've been posting. (I've done that with most of my republican friends for the past couple of months, I really got tired of seeing the mitten every morning).
posted by HuronBob at 1:15 PM on November 1, 2012 [3 favorites]

You can try F.B. Purity-- it makes all of FB better, if you ask me. You can blacklist phrases and words and names-- I have young cousins and when I first installed it I had a Bieber-free feed in an instant (still do). You can probably add "rottenecards" (for example) and it should block all related posts.
posted by mireille at 1:24 PM on November 1, 2012 [1 favorite]

I use Social Fixer for this. It's a web extension that eliminates a lot of Facebook annoyances, including hiding content with specific words in them, from specific people, from certain apps, etc.
posted by eafarris at 1:25 PM on November 1, 2012 [3 favorites]

Mouse-over their name in your feed. When the pop-up appears click friends, then settings, and then deselect the things of theirs you don't want appearing in your feed.
posted by urbanwhaleshark at 2:17 PM on November 1, 2012 [1 favorite]

Urbanwhaleshark -- I'm aware of that one, but for the life of me, I can't figure out what effectively turns off "shares __'s photo" falls under. I experimented with a number of different choices there, and none seemed to effectively do the trick.
posted by WCityMike at 3:32 PM on November 1, 2012

I just set up unbaby.me, and went through one afternoon and set anyone who I didn't see on a regular basis to update only life events. SO much better. There's also an unpolitic.me a friend swears by but I haven't tried that one out. It cut out about 90% of the annoyances you listed in the process.
posted by mcrandello at 4:17 PM on November 1, 2012

Gotta agree with HuronBob: just block this person (no need to unfriend them), and just visit their homepage when you feel like it.

I've done this with my brother-in law, who literally posts 15-20 LONG posts every. single. day..... Between his objectionable (to me, anyway) politics and the way his flood of daily posts blocked views of everyone else's posts, blocking him was a sanity-saver: I made my move the day he posted *32* assorted diatribes. Ever since? Peace and bliss.
posted by easily confused at 4:55 PM on November 1, 2012 [1 favorite]

Anybody know of one that works on Android phones?
posted by canine epigram at 6:51 PM on November 1, 2012 [1 favorite]