Facebook’s “On This Day” feature can at the very least, be annoying, and at the most, it can trigger painful memories that you may not necessarily want to revisit. Here is a way to turn off this feature for at least a year.
We won’t lie, we don’t like the “On This Day” feature, and Facebook has been remarkably tone deaf about it. Despite floods of complaints from users stating that they don’t want or need it, Facebook has seemingly refused to allow people to simply turn it off.
There doesn’t seem to be any reason for Facebook to have such a vested interest in our nostalgia, but regardless, every day there we are, confronted with whatever happened one, two, three years ago on that particular day.
As we said, there’s no way to simply turn off this feature wholesale, but you can fine tune it so that you won’t see these posts for at least a year from now.
It’s All in the Preferences
Facebook will show you a memory every day provided you have posted something on that date from any number of years ago. To effectively turn off these posts, you need to click the arrow in the top-right corner and select “Hide post”.
Facebook will tell you it’s sorry, and then you’ll see a link to click for “On This Day Preferences”.
In the preferences, you can filter out people you don’t want to be reminded of, or you can select a date or range of dates. In this case, we click the “edit” link next to dates.
On the proceeding screen, click “Select Dates”.
First select the starting date. In this case, we just go ahead and select the earliest year (2003) from the dropdown selection.
For our end date, we select a date a year from now (2016), which means that we won’t see any memories for any period from 2003 to 2016, and presumably for at least a year beyond that (2017). Click “Done” to confirm the dates.
Now you see we won’t seem any memories from 11/1/2003 to 11/30/2016. If this isn’t correct, click the “Edit” link to fix it. If you want to cancel or delete this range, click the small “X”. Otherwise, click “Save” to commit your changes.
That’s it, you’re done and you shouldn’t see any more memories for quite some time. Click “Done” to exit the On This Day preferences and return to your newsfeed.
This isn’t the first time we’ve dealt with some kind of Facebook annoyance. In the past we’ve detailed how to stop birthday and other notifications, and how to block Facebook game and app requests. This is, however, the first time we’ve encountered an annoyance such as this without a clear way of simply turning it off and being rid of it.
We hope then that if this feature is bothersome and unwanted, then you will have found this article useful. If you have any questions or comments you would like to contribute, please leave your feedback in our discussion forum.
