Curating your social media feed can be a tricky business. You may be overrun with photos of your friend’s babies or hourly updates on wedding planning from that random girl from one of your university classes… The content bugs you, but not enough to delete that friend and cause offence. So what do you do?
According to Digital Information World you’re not alone in this dilemma. At 36%, the largest reason people begin to dislike social is their network oversharing information, with the International Business Times stating that 7% of people put this down to their networks sharing too many photos of their pets and kids and 52% sharing over-personal information.
This is where Rather comes in. Rather is a chrome based app that allows you to replace content using “kill words”. Kill words act as keyword filters, entering kill words such as “baby photo” will mean within your Facebook and Twitter feeds all posts associated with this theme will be replaced with engaging content in line with your “rathers”. Rathers are keywords of content you enjoy seeing. If you hate baby photos but can’t get enough of MeMe Doge, the world is now your oyster for curating a feed of Doge… much nice, very wow!
There is also an option for ridding cross feed shares. It’s great to see Instagram posts on Instagram and Vines on Vine, but seeing duplicates of these across every feed of that user can be a bit tiresome, rid these duplicates by blocking platforms and view content on the channel for which it was originally intended.
However, if you don’t want to replace overkill with overkill, the mute button also allows you to eradicate kill word content all together to get a cleaner more streamlined feed, an option perfect for more professionally driven profiles.
Of course there are the options of hiding a specific user’s content from your feed on Facebook or the new mute feature on Twitter but these only allow you to block all content from said user, meaning you could lose out on that occasional useful piece of information they may post, be it once in a blue moon.
According to the New York Times, this app could have “fixed the internet”. What do you think, would you rather “Rather”? Check it out here.
