Three Little Dots That Make Facebook Awesome

Three little dots can change your life.

If you currently hate Facebook, think it represents the worst of humanity, or that it’s knocked money off it’s pedestal as reigning root of all evil, then you must not know about the three little dots.

Every Facebook post has three little dots in the top right corner that unlocks a series of powers for every user that can make your Facebook experience much more puppies and people falling down and a lot less “Obama is a muslim.”

Here’s what it looks like when you click the dots…

Let’s talk about what each of these does for you real quick.

Save Post

You can actually save a post to folders that you create for later now. If you see something interesting, but don’t want to read it now because you gots to go get your yoga on, then you can save it to folders to return to later. Just tap the “Saved” folder on the left sidebar to see everything you’ve saved. Beware. It could also become your Facebook junk drawer.

Hide Post

Hiding a post does two things. First, it removes (doesn’t delete) the post never to be seen again by you on your feed. Second, it tells Facebook that the things in this post are not things you want to see, so don’t show me stuff like this anymore. That protects you from the next political rant video. You can actually teach Facebook what to show you. Isn’t that the coolest/creepiest thing you’ve heard today?!

Snooze a person/page for 30 days

This is especially helpful during political seasons. We all have that friend or family member that jumps on a crusade for their candidate during elections that otherwise is a pretty normal guy. You don’t want to unfollow him forever, you just don’t want to hear his weird sermons about the government. When it’s all over, you’ll go back to being friends, but now, you don’t have to remember to take him out of time out. Same for a page that is running a promotion right now you don’t care about.

Unfollow a person/page

Unfollowing a person or page means you will not see their posts and they will not see yours until you change them back to a regular friend. You can both still search for one another and see each others’ wall, but it won’t show up in your regular feed.

Give Feedback on a post/Report it

They’re not really asking you to rate their spelling or noticing the odd use of a semi-colon to fix the comma splice found in the post. This feature allows you to tell Facebook about a post that might violate the platform’s guidelines, contain hateful content, or even false information. If you see something, say something, because unlike the rest of these features, this actually prevents others from seeing harmful stuff too. Protect the community and redeem the space.

Turn on/off notifications for this post

My most used feature of all! Sometimes, I either do or don’t comment on a friend’s post based on how many more notifications I’m going to get after. When you join a conversation, Facebook takes that as “oh, they want to be in this, so we’ll let them know when someone else says something so they can carry on the conversation.” Not always, Facebook. Not always.

So what I do is I comment, and if I’m not interested or I’ve gotten tired of the conversation, I turn off comments and fade away into the night…

It also works the opposite. You can just turn on notifications to see what people say in the post. You don’t have to type “following.” Like a weirdo.

So in summary, if you don’t enjoy Facebook, it’s kind of your fault.

You have control over your experience so make it good. Of course, the flip side of this is that you create an “echo chamber,” where everyone who already agrees with you and will never challenge your thinking all congregate to tell you how perfectly right you are. How nice.

As in everything, balance and wisdom are called for here, but you can still find a happy existence on Facebook. Especially if you live by the golden rule of social media:

Thou shalt not behave like a troll. Have fun!