I unfriended 60 people today. And yesterday. And the day before that. Well, yesterday it was more than 60 because I removed a badly behaved cleric.
Why?
It’s not because they’re Distributists, Sedes, Flat Earthers or Liberals (although I’m sure some % are). It’s because I have this neat little Chrome plugin that tells me who, among my 5,000 friends, do not ‘like’, comment or share my posts. Ever.
In other words, I friended them or they friended me but they never engage with me. Some of them are just stalkers. Others are people who want to unfriend me but politics cause them to merely unfollow (this is mostly family).
Here’s the rub: the way the Facebook algorithm works is that your posts are shown to your friends proportionate to your friends’ engagement your content, and so when people engage, your posts are shown to ever more people, and when they don’t engage, FB stops showing them.
(So if you post and are disappointed at how many of your friends seem to see it, now you know why).
Out of 5,000 friends (as of two weeks ago), 60% had not engaged with a single post in 60 days. I thought that was bad, although it turns out my posts perform very well for an audience of that size.
So what’s the solution? Culling.
Therefore, every day I remove 60 inactive friends at random. Actually, I push the button, and the plugin does the work. In a month I will have … Read the rest
