The Great Facebook Purge of 2014

When Facebook was beginning to grow, several years back, I resisted the urge to sign up. Friends and Family all told me to join them on this cool new service but I resisted. In fact, for a long time I avoided it out of principle.

As the years went by I finally decided to give it a try. Stogie Review was growing and I was having a lot of fun on Twitter. Perhaps this new social media venue could offer up more opportunity to grow Stogie Review and allow me to contact old and new friends.

Over these past few years I’ve gone from having a strict friend request policy to playing it fast and loose. This has lead to an awful lot of noise cluttering up my news feed. Updates from friends and family were being drowned out by politics, religion, and meme photos that stopped being funny after the fifth time they showed up.

I’ve known I needed to do something about all of the noise but I just haven’t been able to get motived and actually get started. That all changed a couple of days ago. I was talking to a friend that told me he cut his friend list down by several hundred people.

The news was kind of inspirational and I made a point to do the same. Yesterday afternoon I pulled up my friend list and began cutting it down. My criteria was very simple, if I could recall seeing your name on my timeline in the last few months, and enjoying what I read, you stayed. Family and people that I knew personally also stayed. Everyone else was pulled out.

I began feeling a little guilty about the mass-unfriending but I kept plowing through the names. When I was finished I wound up clearing out somewhere between 300 to 350 friends.

I opened up Facebook on my phone later that evening and it was like a completely different service. The reduction in noise was incredible and for the first time in a long time I actually enjoyed scrolling through the updates.