The Stupidest Pro-Google+ Argument
Since Google+ came out last July, ever single blog post I’ve read on it that allows commenting consists of some variation of the same stupid comment:
“Discussions on Google+ tend to be smarter/wittier/more intellectually stimulating, whereas discussions on Facebook tend to be more banal/stupid/make me question my faith in humanity.”
And every time I read one of those comments, I tilt my head to the side and blink-because that’s my confused face and those comments confuse the hell out of me.
Ok, first off, to see someone’s status updates and such in your Facebook news feed you have to friend them. So, those people posting those stupid updates? You added them by choice.
Now, I understand that maybe the person you added you didn’t quite add “by choice”-you felt obligated. And I totally understand-if I recognize the name, I feel obligated to add-even if I recognize the name from someone I was acquaintances with in elementary school and haven’t talked to since.
But just because I understand your reasoning for adding people who you might not necessarily WANT to add doesn’t mean you get a pass to go on bitching about people’s stupid updates.
Because you don’t have to see them.
Seriously, if you see a status update from a person and you don’t want to see status updates from that person again, you can click on the little tab thingy to the right of their update AND FIX YOU SUBSCRIPTION SETTINGS.
See:
So, while that will help you for stories that you come across in your news feed, it’s a bit of a passive approach-you have to wait for a status update that you don’t want to see. What if you want to be a bit more proactive?
- Go to your Facebook profile page.
- Click on “Subscriptions.”
- Click on “x-Number Friend Subscriptions.”
- Now you can easily go through your friends list and choose from the following options for each friend:
Category 1: How Many Updates?
- All Updates
- Most Important Updates
- Only Important
Category 2: What Type of Updates?
- Life Events
- Status Updates
- Photos
- Games
- Comments and Likes
- Music and Videos
- Other Activity
Or you can just click “Unsubscribe” and never see ANY of their updates.
See?! Problem solved.
I have around 140-something friends. Took me less than 20 minutes to go through and change my settings-and I changed the settings probably around 70, 80 people. So, it’s not even that time consuming. Plus, even if you have 400 friends and wanted to change the subscriptions for all of them and it takes you a little over an hour and a half, that’s an hour and a half up front that will save you time in the future, because now instead of wading through a shitload of updates you don’t care about, you’ll see the updates you do want to see right away.
In conclusion, anyone who’s using the “conversations are so much better on Google+-I NEVER have to see stupid updates!,” needs to stop whining and fix their settings.
In addition, they need to come to terms with the fact that less people are on Google+. The less people, the less people who are making stupid “I’M HAVING TOAST FOR BREAKFAST, HOLLA!” updates. Trust me, when more people join Google+, you’ll see more of those updates.
