Today, almost everyone has a Facebook or Twitter account, attesting to social media’s big part in modern day-to-day life.
Unfortunately, not every post you see is relevant at all. Some people begin to form lamentable habits of posting things that may not be of your interest or are just annoying.
For example, as much as you love keeping tabs on your good friends, you cannot ignore the fact that every other status update is about their love for frivolous things like One Direction. Even if you like things like that, the constant posts and updates can get old.
A new Chrome extension called Rather offers the solution: its goal is to help minimize the small annoyances of social media by suppressing your friends’ most irritating status updates with the use of key words. By using “One Direction” as a filtering key word, you can have a newsfeed free of the English-Irish boy band. It also gives you the option to replace the updates you don’t want to see with pictures of something you do want to see, such as puppies or flowers gathered up by a hash tag, or you can simply “mute” it. And don’t worry if you feel as if you’re missing out on something relevant after filtering your friends’ content; you can simply undo it.
According to Yahoo! News, Rather is a descendant of an earlier project by co-founder Chris Baker called Unbaby Me. It was a similar Chrome extension designed to filter pictures of your friends’ darling infants. It started out as a sort of a joke but people actually began to take a liking to it. Baker and his partners decided that they were on to something and invested in the concept.
It is brand-new and still needs some tweaking, but for now Baker and his collaborators say they are working on building a user base and making a swankier variation of it in the months ahead.
A popular response to Rather could be, “If you don’t want to see my statuses then you should just unfriend me,” but that’s not necessarily the issue. People should be able to choose to hear everything from their aunt Sammy except her thoughts about the Obama administration, or nothing from their uncle Tom except his thoughts on college football. Facebook offers some degree of control to users, but if users get tired of the political gibberish upon their newsfeed, they feel forced to eventually unfriend some people completely. Rather is simply going to be used to make Facebook more enjoyable and more appealing to your personal interests.
April Riley, a fellow Facebook user, claims, “Lately, I’ve barely been getting on Facebook because of all the unnecessary stuff on my newsfeed. I don’t care what new clothes [this] baby got or how much she loves Justin Bieber. It’s just annoying.”
