Facebook training tip – remove annoying status updates with the hidden Hide button
Summary:
If you have Facebook friends who post their status 20 times a day, you can make them disappear, and they will never know about it. Ironically, Facebook hides the Hide feature.
Details:
Everyone has at least one friend that posts every insignificant move of their day onto Facebook, like
- … is making coffee
- … is adding more sugar
- … is adding cream
- … is stirring
and on and on. It gets worse if they are having a full breakfast.
Want to make all of their statuses disappear? It’s easy to do using the Facebook Hide feature, but ironically, and idiotically, Facebook hides the Hide button. Learn the solution by text (below) or by 60 second video here:
or if that video didn’t work, click Youtube Video – hide annoying Facebook status updates and applications
If you are looking at a status update from one these self-absorbed, narcissistic, ego-centric people, do the following:
- Move your mouse to the upper right hand corner of the “box” that contains the status update
- A button will magically appear that will say Hide
- Click it to see a drop down box
- One of the choices is to say Hide <annoying_friends_name>
- Click it, and you will feel so much better
All of their statuses on your page will disappear now and forever, and they will never know. That is, until you see them in person and they say, “Hey, did you hear that I added sugar to my coffee this morning?” It’s a shame you can’t click the button when you see them in person.
If you ever decide that you do want to see their posts again, you can
- go to the bottom of your Home page
- click “Edit options” on the right
- choose to add them back into your news feed
You can also use the same feature to remove all of those annoying quizzes like
- What Flintstones character are you?
- How well do you remember 90210?
However, you have to remove them one by one. You can’t click a button that says “Remove all stupid quizzes”.
Someday, I promise you, Facebook will give in to the angry masses and have a button that that allows you to
- Remove all quizzes
- Remove all mafia wars updates
- Remove all the other things other than status updates
I just hope they don’t hide it.
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11 comments
Can’t make it work for the ads.
I’ve noticed that Facebook has a bug with the ‘Hide’ feature. If someone who I’ve hidden comments on my status or a post of mine and I then reply in that thread 5 to 10 minutes later a weird message, displayed as being from me, appears. The text is things like “You Are Strange”, “You Are Weird”, “Dont Send Me No More Ok” or “Tu Es Fou” (Italian for ‘you are strange’).
This happens on both my iMac and Windows PCs and I’m also very security concious (full McAfee and secondary mallware scanners) and never visit a site McAfee warns against.
Doug,
That really sounds like a virus. If you use any of the Facebook applications, you are more likely to get viruses like that. I would have thought McAfee would have stopped it, but I don’t use them, so I don’t know.
My Hero!
Will I still be able to see comments to my posts from people I hide?
I’m not sure if you see comments from “hidden people” if they comment on my posts, although I don’t remember seeing any posts from these people in comments, so I would guess they are removed. However, I do recall seeing their updates as comments on other people’s posts, so they don’t disappear completely.
Hey Patrick,
It looks like the hide menu changed to a button recently (within the past couple of weeks). The button hides the person by default, when I instead want to hide the application.
Do you know where they moved the “hide this application” feature?
Thanks!
Ahh, never mind. I get it — you have to be on the “News Feed” in the new design to hide the application.
[...] You can remove clutter from your feed via Facebook itself. The button for hiding a friend or an application from your feed is, ironically, usually hidden from view. You can learn about this highly useful yet hardly known feature on the blog of Patrick O’Malley. [...]
if someone hides your posts does that make it so you can’t see their status posts? I have some people in my friends list that I have never seen their status posts, but when I went to leave them a “hello” on their wall they have status updates that I have never seen and it never posted to my home page.
Camsav,
Even if they hide you, you should be able to see their status updates. However, they can set up privacy settings to prevent people from seeing them.
Realize also that Facebook is still very “buggy”, so sometime it just doesn’t work right.
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