Does your dream Facebook feed include pics of other people’s kids?

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We’ve all been there: You pop onto Facebook to watch the latest must-see cat video only to find your friends clogging up your feed with pictures of their babies. Again.

In all honesty, I’m usually the one posting the pics. Guilty as charged. I’m not on Facebook a lot, but when I am it’s usually to share a photo of my kids being totally adorable. As far as I’m concerned, that’s what Facebook is for. Well, that and those awesome Delish cooking videos.

Not everyone agrees, though.

The divide between people who love seeing endless streams of cute kid pictures and people who loathe it is never as clear as it is during back-to-school season. During the first week of September, my entire Facebook feed seems to be devoted to photos of kids standing on their front doorsteps with big, gap-toothed grins and chalkboard signs reading, “First day of grade 2!”

Every single of one of them gets a Like from me. Probably not from this Yahoo! writer, though: “Here’s an idea: take the photo… and keep it for yourself. Or email it to the grandparents and cousins who care. Look at it all you want, and keep it on your phone so you can bore the lady next door when you run into her at the liquor store. I’m not trying to stop people from taking pictures of their kids, just to dissuade them from doing the virtual equivalent of taping it to every hydro pole in town.” [Editor’s note: That’s a utility pole in American]

Well, today there is good news for him and for everyone else who is sick to death of being force-fed cute photos of other people’s kids. Facebook is piloting a new news feed — if you see a rocket ship icon on your mobile app, that’s the one — that will eliminate all of that excess, giving you only the news, public posts, and videos it thinks you will actually be interested in.

“We are testing a complementary feed of popular articles, videos and photos, customized for each person based on content that might be interesting to them,” a company spokesperson explains. “We’ve heard from people that they want an easy way to explore new content they haven’t connected with yet.”

This announcement got me thinking. While I have absolutely no problem with kids’ photos, I don’t want to shove my own down the throats of people who don’t want to see them. So if my FB friends want to opt out of my back-to-school picture posts, I’m going to try not to take it personally. After all, there is some content I’d happily filter out of my Facebook feed. In no particular order:

• Cryptic status updates: “You’ll look back on this and regret it one day.” What are you talking about? Who will look back on what? Inevitably some concerned friend will comment, “You okay, hon?” Which prompts the infuriating, “Don’t feel like talking about it.” UGH.


• Game invitations: If I had a dollar for every time I’ve been invited to play Farmville on Facebook, I would have approximately $14,000. Unfortunately, I don’t get a dollar every time, so it’s just really annoying.


• Weather alerts: I live in the Pacific Northwest, where we collectively lose our sh*t at the sight of snow. We also like to complain excessively about rain, even though it rains pretty much all the time. Oh, and we don’t like it too hot, either. And we like to post about all of it all the time.


• Minion memes: You know the ones. I love the Minions in Despicable Me. I just don’t love them when accompanied by random, useless text. (Example: “I wish my wallet came with free refills!” HAHAHA.)


• Bathroom selfies: It’s weird how many selfies are taken in the bathroom. And you always know it’s in the bathroom, because you can see the edge of an old shower curtain or a tiled wall in the background. Did you wash your hands? Are you even wearing pants?


• Political posts: I really don’t mind a good political debate, I actually find them quite interesting — but I just about never see those on Facebook. Instead I see ideological rants and insults, with links to biased sites and videos to back them up.


• Busy brags: Busy is the new black. All anyone talks about these days is how busy and crazy and chaotic life is, and it’s spilled over into our Facebook status updates as well. Stop it. There are so many things about you that are so much more interesting than the fact that you’re “busy.”


• Life tutorials: Cooking, cosmetics, hairstyles, crafts, workouts: I’m lumping them all into one category here. “7 steps to lose the belly fat!” “10 hairstyles you can do in 10 seconds!” “14 impossibly easy DIY crafts!” Very rarely are any of these things actually easy or quick. (This, for instance.) My 10-second hairstyle never looks the way it does in the video, and my DIY craft could very well be mistaken for my 6-year-old’s latest art project.


• Cat videos: There. I said it. *ducking and covering*

Yes, I think I’ll just stick with the baby photos.

What would you filter out of your Facebook feed?

Images via iStock

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