Social Fixer Helps Improve Your Facebook Experience

Over the past couple of years, social media has become a minefield. It's great for the most part, but you'll often find battles and arguments that don't really add anything positive to your life. The two (or more) parties arguing hardly ever come to any reasonable agreement.

I know I have changed my mind many times after having a reasonable discussion with others it's part of what I do; see #69 here.

But from my experience, most people stick to their guns just because they can't admit publicly that they could have been wrong or that they have learned everything. Or if I dare say it, they stick to their argument --no matter how flawed it may be-- because of identity politics.

Social media has allowed us and actively encourages us to build echo chambers that only support us and don't really challenge us.

But there are some of us that use social media to enhance our business so we need to use it. It is exhausting to deal with the bickering and the circular arguments.

So what can we do to fix Facebook?

Facebook isn't going to change anytime soon, amidst security breaches, corruption and violations of our data, they still remain the best social network as far as features and benefits.

I think they're seeing a bigger backlash now, but until a real viable social network comes along to dethrone Facebook, it's up to us to make it better.

This is what I did recently and it completely transformed my Facebook experience. It's not the first time I do this. I did it back in January around the same time as Affiliate Summit, but after a week or so I ran into problems with the extension so I went back to regular Facebook.

This time around, I think the extension has improved a lot and I'm not running into any problems so far. The extension I'm using is called Social Fixer. It's available for most major browsers, though it isn't available for mobile.

I talked about this in one of my videos recently.

Video: Fixing Facebook

How to fix Facebook

The first step is to install Social Fixer, you can get it here. It installs really easily, just find the link for your browser. It's available for Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Safari. If you want to use it with MS Edge, you'll need to use Tampermonkey first.

After you install it, you'll need to open up a new tab for Facebook so the extension loads. You'll see a new icon in your Facebook interface on the top right corner. This accesses all the options for Social Fixer.

 

The main options I changed are as follows.

Change the order of the feed to be in chronological order

For the longest time, Facebook would show you the items on your feed in chronological order, but in recent years they changed that option to show you the top stories only.

Later on they gave us an option to pick one or the other, but eventually, they removed it.

Although you can still access the feed in chronological order by adding this to the end of the facebook.com address: "?sk=h_chr&sfx_switch=true"  without the quotes, Facebook no longer offers a link to change it.

Social Fixer can automatically load your feed in chronological order every time. When you do this, Facebook will give you a link to go back to the Top stories in case you want to see that for now.

It's a nice change to see all the stuff you've been missing.

With the change to a chronological order, you'll see a lot of stuff that you've been missing. Stuff from your friends and people you care about but somehow Facebook deemed wasn't important.

Setting the chronological order also lets you see all the junk you've been part of allowing you to clean it up.

This includes groups you joined and are no longer active in, friends that you accepted but aren't really your friends or have any connection whatsoever, and pages that you no longer want to follow.

Having the feed in chronological order reveals all these things so you can clean it up.

Add a filter list of words

This one is great, but also a double-edged sword.

I mentioned how social networks help and encourage echo chambers. If you're not careful, you could create a list of words that will encourage that echo chamber.

I suggest you add words that balance each other out but prevent posts that will distract you or create turmoil in your business.

If you want to discuss deep nuanced ideas, like politics, I suggest you check out a platform like kialo.com. Most of you won't because you actually like arguing and having your friends back you up and when you finally have the last word you'll feel good about "winning" but at the end of the day you would have wasted all that time arguing instead of focusing on income-generating activities.

Here is the list of words I added if you were curious or want a seed list:

Election
Hillary
Trump
the resistance
MAGA
midterm elections
Kavanaugh
Blasey Ford
Sponsored

Your list will probably be different, but please notice that I tried to balance mine and I encourage you to do the same.

There are dozens of options to help you improve the overall experience. Review the screenshot above and you'll notice some of the general options I have set.

Social fixer also can do some cool stuff to clean up Facebook even more. You can, for example, hide entire sections if you don't want to see them, like the stories section on the right-hand side.

You can even hide the whole sponsored post section on the right-hand side.

But the thing that has made Facebook fun again is that I can see the stuff I want to see instead of having Facebook decide for me.

I am seeing so many things I've been missing from my actual friends and those people I know in person.

I cannot recommend Social Fixer enough. So far it's amazing. It didn't use to work well with Chrome, but it seems like it is doing a great job now.