CLEANING UP YOUR NEWSFEED
Information sounds like quite a broad term, but to survive in this digital era of social media and smartphones, it is definitely a necessity.
Whether it's keeping up with the latest news or ensuring your meme game is on point, your main point of contact with such content is usually your newsfeed. Therefore, it's essential to keep your feed as de-cluttered and organised as possible. With social media becoming a cesspool of fake news and random memes in recent years, it has become quite difficult to navigate it for your required information. For those of you looking for a better newsfeed experience the tips below may help you in your quest.
The Memes
Memes are essential to surviving our daily monotonous lives and reality in general. But the number of meme pages and groups you've accumulated over the years may just be a hindrance at this point. Pages with names like "Shonar moinar dank memes", that one of your friends – who you don't even talk to anymore – convinced you to follow ages ago, should probably be the ones to go first. And let's not forget pages which repost memes without properly crediting the original creators. Keep to the tried and tested pages which are known for delivering quality memes.
The power of unfollowing
I'm sure some of you out there have accumulated a large number of friends on Facebook over the course of multiple coachings, friend groups, extracurricular activities and so on. You don't have to jump the gun and start deleting them, but you could unfollow a few of them – whose posts you scroll past anyway. For anyone still typing like this "aMaKe vLoVa$hA dEo" the decision to unfollow is even easier. And let's not even start on the people who share mindless propaganda and fake news.
News outlets
The entire reason for dealing with the last two points is to ensure there's adequate real estate on your feed for the essential news. To keep with the theme, it's best to get rid of any illegitimate news pages that you follow. Pages that post stuff like "Do you KNOW what China is doing in Noakhali? Click to find out" – and when you open it to find an article about some Chinese guy vlogging on his trip to Bangladesh – are the sort of clickbait trash you don't need on your feed. It's always best to ensure the pages you follow for news are all legitimate news outlets, which are held to a certain standard.
Feedly
If you're tired of relying on Facebook for any coherent information and use it for nothing beyond "haha" reacting on your friend's pictures, then might I suggest Feedly? Unlike Facebook, Feedly helps you set up your own custom feed, using a vast repository of sources, from news outlets to random websites. Additionally, Feedly gives suggestions for each category of topic, and all of these sources can be trusted. And the icing on the cake is that it works on your browser and Android or iPhone.
The end result should, ideally, be a newsfeed that is easier to interact with and extract information from. And the suggestions above are a step in the right direction, where a cleaner and minimalist feed helps make your life easier.
Aaqib is stuck in an existential crisis loop. Send help at aaqibhasib94@gmail.com