Let’s talk about Facebook. While Twitter and Instagram may seem to now overshadow the social media giant in terms of rapid-fire, meaningless status updates and food photos, Facebook remains a sort of hub for all communication. As oxymoronic as it sounds, Facebook feels a bit more ‘business’ than the two other social media staples — almost as if it is the email of the social networking world. What’s more, both Twitter and Instagram, along with a host of other web services, can ‘connect’ with Facebook and integrate with its posting features. However, Facebook is still one of the few social media services that has features that are designed to do things other than communicate with people you know or meet. Once upon a time, the ‘page’ was introduced, and it wasn’t just another way to get inundated with advertisements on the Internet. While they were initially for businesses, one could get in touch with the mundane and ‘like’ the phenomenons, occurrences, and feelings that we experience on a daily basis. For these pages, the term ‘liking’ wasn’t literal: one could ‘like’ “I hate bitchy teachers” or “traffic is the worst”. ‘Liking’ merely indicated an acknowledgement of life’s realities and nuances, both good and bad. For a while, the reassurance you got from seeing that other people were taking notice of life’s little things was kind of cool — but then again, so was Farmville. People soon moved on. But that’s not why I’m writing this article.

This feature was introduced as MySpace was on the outs, Barack Obama was a senator from Illinois, and I was in middle school. Back then, seeing that a girl liked the “I like my crush so much but I’m too scared to say anything” page as I scrolled through status updates about skateboarding, homework, and parents gave me a glimmer of hope that it was me. But though I had the intuition to know deep-down that my page-liking love interest would never love me back, even my advanced and fully-developed middle school mind — a mind that thought conspicuously smoking cigarettes in front of 7-Eleven with my friends would somehow attract women and not policemen – could not predict that these pages would transform from feelings, interests, and beliefs into beacons for the most mindless crap available on the internet.

If you’re like me and you liked pages like “I hate that Sunday night ‘school the next day’ feeling” (along with 1.5 million others — maybe it’s time to consider a 4-day work week) when you were 13 years old, crap like this clogs up your newsfeed when you’re just trying to see what your old friends are doing in college and beyond. At first, I didn’t know what the hell happened. And frankly, I didn’t care; I interpreted it as further evidence that maybe I should cut down on my Facebook usage. However, after I graduated this past June and I began to drift from the people whom I used to see on a daily basis, I decided that my Facebook newsfeed should actually show news about my friends.

Sure, I could unlike every single stupid, vapid page that I thought “totally described how I felt” in 7th grade, but why should I have to? Where does this stuff even come from? Deviating from my usual process of just scrolling past these stupid pseudo-memes, I decided to potentially infect my computer with a million viruses and find out. Clicking on the link to “if br@s were a game” (apparently ‘bra’ is a bad word now) leads me to a very sophisticated, high-brow website called roflzone.com.

Upon disabling my Adblock Plus extension, I came to the conclusion that roflzone.com — to be referred to as ‘The Zone’ from here on out — seems to stay afloat with banner ad revenue. This was all but confirmed by a post on one of those pages that hadn’t yet been corrupted by advertising, stating that someone who owned a site like ‘The Zone’ could purchase control of the page for a few thousand dollars, providing the (commercially motivated) buyer with the benefit of having an audience of millions who are too lazy to unlike the page. It’s pretty genius if you think about it. Fast-thinking, financially-motivated people are taking advantage of people’s tendency to forget and be lazy.

No one is actually going to take the time to go into every page they liked — and if you’re like me, you’ve liked literally hundreds — and delve into the drop-down menu and click unlike. Even though the ads are annoying, intrusive, and incongruous with the original purpose of these pages, people are willing to put up with it because it’s easier to train your eyes to automatically glaze over this stupid, irrelevant material than to actually do something about it. Yes, people are now too lazy to complete tasks within the confines of the computer that they use way too much. And if that means they deserve to see them, fine; these sites are obviously generating some level of ad revenue from curious clickers to stay afloat. But it all seems kind of skeevy. While the pages may have been stupid even before they were taken over by advertisers, people didn’t ‘like’ them to get their home screens polluted with trash.

So I decided to do something about it. Though I had neither time nor energy to distinguish between good and bad pages and then unlike every page that had given me trouble, I found a solution. Anytime you see one of these meaningless pages, click on the down arrow in the upper right hand corner of the post, and click ‘Hide all from (page name)’. While it does take some time, you can do it as you use Facebook. Eventually, with patience, perseverance, and dedication, you too can have an annoyance-free Facebook. Freedom!

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