How to block facebook notifications from certain people?

February 17, 2014 7:48 AM

I can't block these people but I'd prefer to not know when they like or comment on my posts.

I have security settings such that they can't see most of the content that I post. On the content that I do enable them to see, they blow up my notifications by liking and commenting on everything and then liking each other's comments. This is just within the website, not emails (I already have those turned off).

Is there a way to block notification of a specific person's interaction with me? When I search I can only find how to turn off notifications for an entire post, not just one person.

posted by emkelley to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

You can relegate different people to different groups, like "Close Friends and Family," and work out notifications that way. I don't think you can go as granular as to the user level on notifications, but with clever grouping of your contacts, it should be possible to eliminate those notifications.
posted by xingcat at 7:55 AM on February 17, 2014

Response by poster: I have all the people who I want to pseudo-block in one group already, a blacklist of sorts. Are you saying that I should whitelist who I do want notifications from? I already have this group out of my News Feed.
posted by emkelley at 7:59 AM on February 17, 2014

I don't think there are general settings for this that are fine-grained enough to cover "certain people can see/comment on/like my posts, but don't send me notifications, but do send notifications for everyone else". The closest I can find is to block comment notifications on a post-by-post basis (as you mentioned).

You can relegate different people to different groups, like "Close Friends and Family," and work out notifications that way. I don't think you can go as granular as to the user level on notifications, but with clever grouping of your contacts, it should be possible to eliminate those notifications.

Where do you set Notification settings for different groups? The only thing I can find is that "Close Friends" automatically send you *more* notifications (e.g. every time they post something). The only settings I can find about restricting groups is stopping them seeing posts altogether. Once they can see the posts, there doesn't seem to be any way of allowing them to comment/like but blocking notifications.

In fact, the Notifications Settings page explicitly says:

What You Get Notified About >>
Activity that involves you >>
You'll always get notifications about activity that involves you, like when someone tags you in a photo or comments on your post.

posted by EndsOfInvention at 8:24 AM on February 17, 2014

It's possible there is a Greasemonkey extension for this though, so it might be worth investigating that.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 8:25 AM on February 17, 2014

I thought that Social Fixer might have something that could do this, but looking at the feature list, I'm not sure it does.
posted by ursus_comiter at 8:38 AM on February 17, 2014 [1 favorite]

I installed Facebook Purity for this, and even with everything it can do, I found the only way to not see comments etc was to block them.
posted by ellieBOA at 9:46 AM on February 17, 2014 [1 favorite]

I think you could stop notifications on the posts they can see - of course then you wouldn't be able to see other people's comments on those posts either but maybe it would be worth it?
posted by mskyle at 10:06 AM on February 18, 2014