:( why? - Iain Baker

The Internet is devastated. This is going to be worse than when Brad Pitt and Jennifer Anniston broke up. - James Ferguson

Boo! I really enjoy your posts! - Ayşe E.

perhaps you just need a romantic weekend away to rekindle the flame - RAPatton

LOL, just yesterday I was looking at your profile and asked myself how does this guy manage to Like 1000 items a week :) - Aviv

The hot flames of early FriendFeed romance wane. Now comes the hard marriage part... - Hutch Carpenter

James, does that mean I get to date Angelina Jolie and have multiple ethnic children? Score! But for the past 4 or 5 days, I've hidden 27/28 out of every 30 posts. The vast, vast, vast majority of content falls into the following categories: 1) there's too much unwashed masses on Friendfeed gunking up the works, 2) what's wrong with blogging, 3) bacon, 4) look! a picture! 5) lol! Fail whale! lol! It seems systemic, but maybe I should just call a mulligan, but that seems like a lot of work. - Mark Trapp

Mark, yes, but the Internet equivalent, so it will probably be some fancy looking new coat on an old site. I hope you like the "New" Facebook. As for your hiding of posts, why not tweak your subscriptions? - James Ferguson

Same thing happend to me on twitter. Solution? Unsubscribe from everyone, and start subscribing again. Selectively - VERY selectively. - Yuvi

Mark - I went through that. Don't be so hasty man. I'm still connecting, learning etc more here than anywhere else. If you have to, start over! - Charlie Anzman

Aviv, that's actually a conscious effort to promote content outside the categories I described. I've been on Friendfeed for about 3 or 4 months now, and 1/5 of my likes occurred in the past week. For every like I give, there's probably about 25 things I've hidden. James, I've been looking at it, and I think to deal with my ennui, I'd have to drop something like 200 subscriptions. - Mark Trapp

You aren't ditching entirely hopefully? I definitely appreciate seeing you on FF, Mark. - Phil G

regarding your love affair, FF needs better filters more than less noise - Todd Jordan

I think a 17 year old and a +/- 50 guy just said the same thing .... THAT'S WHAT THIS IS ALL ABOUT. That gap is important! - Charlie Anzman

Yuvi and Charlie: you guys are definitely confirming what I thought I'd have to do. I'll have to think about it some more. - Mark Trapp

Take the good with the bad. An FF marriage is considered healthy if you like at least 10% of the time and hide no more than 75% of the time. :) - Hao Chen

You can checkout any time you like, but you can never leave...Till death do us part! - Hao Chen

Mark - I've got 625 followers here and I'm managing it. In all honestly, i try not to use block, so it took a few DAYS to sort out. I LOVE the new people! - Charlie Anzman

Charlie, that's been my favorite part of Friendfeed: finding interesting content from people I've never seen before. I trimmed out 100 subscriptions after FriendVenn, and within a couple weeks, all of those subscriptions were replaced with new people. A lot of them are really, really cool. - Mark Trapp

Yeah, Mark. Don't leave. You would be sorely missed. Feel free to just unsubscribe from me to decrease the noise. I'm willing to take one for the team :) - Rahsheen ™, Coach Rah

Sounds like you need to re-evaluate who you follow. Sounds like an simple, but tedious, solution. - Bwana ☠

hope you don't bail mark, i too am enjoying your participation - trim some subs is my suggestion (and others above)... - mike "glemak" dunn

The Unsubscribe from Rahsheen Solution...hmmm...NAAAH! - Hutch Carpenter

If you said that about Twitter, it would be absurd because Twitter is for so many uses for so many different kinds of people. FF is the same and I think you are making more of an issue out of the particular people who you follow. - Andrew Baron

That's why I've kept my subscriptions down. There are some people I pick up through FOAF that I want to see, but I don't want to subscribe to them because they have too many subscriptions and pull in too much noise. - Jason Carreira

I'm so sad! I love your likes/comments. Well, yes, but I only follow like 70 people so I'm unaware of the oversaturation issue with reads. I agree with Yuri & others- remove all and start again. - anna sauce

Love affair? Maybe you're into it a bit much. I just look at Friendfeed as something to dip into when I'm bored. - Morton Fox

Andrew, I think looking at it with broad strokes, if the majority of subscriptions I have are providing content I'm not interested in, maybe it's not them: it's me. That was my original sentiment; that maybe I'm just not into Friendfeed anymore. But it does look through a consensus of advice that re-evaluating my subscription list is a worthwhile endeavor. These types of threads are one of the things i love about Friendfeed; bouncing off ideas and notions to see what others think. - Mark Trapp

based on the 25+ repsonse in an hour, I would say that FF is still in love with you. - RAPatton

Yeah, sheesh: on a Friday afternoon no less! Everyone, I appreciate your advice and support. Maybe Friendfeed and I just need to go through couples' therapy and work out our issues. - Mark Trapp

yeah Mark, please don't go away. I and I think several of us would miss you. You tend to be one of the more thoughtful commenters on here. did you just need a little validation? ;) - Kamilah Gill

I've really resisted adding a lot of subscriptions because I worry about the frequency of Hide. I just hid all Disqus content which helped enormously and am going to start adding some more subscriptions soon, but slowly. The big thing for me is that I see A LOT now because of the Friend Of feature. - AJ Kohn

Maybe it's just time for all of us to figure out how to best use FF. I want BOTH silly, nonsensical stuff AND important tech news and discussion, but other folks just want one or the other. I'm not sure rooms works well for this because I want to see it all in the same feed. Any ideas? - Chrimmus Tad

Gonna agree with the herd on this, dude. Just trim the subs. The ppl will still be there, but the stream won't make your eyes bleed - Jim Stanger

@Tad: perhaps it's time for a new FF tab, say, "LOLcats"? :) - Aviv

http://friendfeed.com/rooms... - close enough - mike "glemak" dunn

How about a Bacon Room ? - johnpiercy

Maybe you need to hide more en masse? Hiding all ____ from ____. that don't have likes or comments. I do a lot of that. - Shey, Jamaican of FF

Mark, I am liking this because of the conversation it generated. There are some good suggestions here too. I may have to start trimming some subs as well. - Rob Diana

Lately, I've been hiding all ____ from ____ that don't have likes/comments except for Friendfeed internal posts. With ~750 subscriptions, the noise is catching up to me. - Hao Chen

i'm using the userscript that always display 100 entries on FF. of those entries, ~50 are hidden. - Alan Le

I like 100. Another feature I'm dying to have is Groups (make a subset of your subscriptions that contain just your closer friends or a list of people with specific interests). The GM script version doesn't work well for me. - Hao Chen

Really like Hao's idea about the groups. That would help a lot. PS. Mark - you're not going anywhere and you know it :) - Justin Korn

@Justin: Hao was referring to http://ffapps.com/filters/ - Aviv

@Hao: What are the difficulties that you're experiencing with it? - Aviv

@Aviv I subscribe to a lot of people, so when I filter by groups, every page is basically a blank page (all hidden entries because they don't match my group members). I'm also having a problem editing the groups (from the group page). - Hao Chen

Justin, you're right: everyone has talked me down from the ledge :-P I've been going through my subscriptions, and while I haven't made any decisions on how I want to narrow them down, I thought this was interesting: I'm subscribed to 470 people, of those 470 people, I was only able to immediately identify 85 by name alone. With a quick glance of their profile page, the number went up to 128. I'm starting to think that study on "you can only manage 150 people in your network" was right. - Mark Trapp

Good discussion. Don't go. Relax and play. Take a break for a few days that is what I had to do. :-) - Mathew A. Koeneker

I am feeling the same and am trying to just hide the stuff I find noisy. - Robert Scoble

well, i'm not going to make any firm statements, but i definitely hear what you are saying, mark. also trying to decide if maybe i should unsubscribe... - edythe

Seems lots of people have the same problem. Definitely, more filter options needed. For example, for a Scoble blog entry, there is one thread from Scoble, and probably 25 from others sharing it on Google Reader. So everyday, I look 30 pages app., and probably hiding 27 threads on every page. This means a LOT of noise. But, even I'm spending much time to filter, I learn lots of interesting things. - Hakan Deryal

@Mark .. and everyone else complaining about this. I have felt the same way recently. Here are my suggestions: 1) Make sure you are hiding ALL content from services you don't want - I hide BrightKite, most of Twitter, and a few select other "noisy" services. 2) Remove subscriptions you might have that you don't want anymore 3) Hide FOAF 4) NoiseRiver: Up and until FriendFeed allows some more complex filtering, NoiseRiver is a serious solution... Auto Hide content by keywords or users. - Tim Hoeck

There is a burnout factor - I've managed to hit it twice... but there's no reason to "abandon." Lately, though, I've been questioning why I do social media at all. I love the power of it and it's very interesting, but I spent an inordinate amount of time on it, when it's not my job to do so. - Vince DeGeorge

Really interesting discussion. FF brings in a LOT of noise depending on your subscriptions, sorting the noise is tough. - Michael

I think we need one of those "Leave FriendFeed Alone" videos. - Roberto Bonini

Well I definitely understand feeling "over it." That's how I feel. I'm going to have to subscribe to some different people, and drop some. For now, it just feels like an off-topic forum. Maybe I've spent too much time in the "junk food" bin of FF. - Louie

Mark, next to Louis Gray you are at the top of my "People you find interesting" list. At the same time you are at the absolute top of the "People who find you interesting" list too. Just slow down. Stop finding me interesting. But stay put. - Vinay | विनय

Vinay, you actually highlighted an interesting part of the stats page. I just went through your feed, and I've liked a total of two things and commented twice on your feed. Isn't that a little strange I'm the number one on your "people who find you interesting" list? - Mark Trapp

Mark, I hear ya. And I'm an unusual frequent FF users in that I only have 46 subscriptions. Still tons of noise. And I've actually thought recently that I could knock it down to about 5 people: very active users whose content I really like. But then I'm relying on them doing the work for me. I could also try to convince edythe not to "like" quite so much, but that's part of the fun. The most annoying thing over all, is FF hasn't had a serious enhancement since forever! What are those guys doing all day?? - Ňicķ

I think it simply means that others have not liked/commented even that much. - Vinay | विनय

Mark - Agreed. I think it is Summer doldrums. I've been off for three days and did not miss anything. I got my first .BIZ subr. - Russellreno

My usage will be a lot less through August. - Russellreno

I'm late to this party but it's cyclic for me. I'll have a short period of activity followed by a short period of inactivity. - Akiva Moskovitz

I'm been at a conference for the past 3 days. Did some activity move to socialmedian? Groups - I'd love to make groups of friends in Tech News, Tech, Funny stuff I like, Other funny stuff, Photos, Nature, Science, Interior Design, Design, Art, Music, Food, Kids, Controversial, Quick Check, Close Friends, New Friends, etc... - Mitchell Tsai

Mark Suck it up! You're one of the FF Mark's now start acting like one! yeah, I'll try and guess what other movies besides Shawshank Redemption :D - Mark Forman

leave it to mark (forman) to throw the man up card ;) - mike "glemak" dunn

I am starting to feel a bit guilty because maybe I am "sharing" too much info and driving people crazy. - R. Ferguson