New Facebook Tool Offers a Quick Silence Option for Annoying Posts

Popular social networks have spent years trying to write a perfect algorithm to suggest who to follow, even if it attenuates our feeds. That’s because News Feed, a self-regulating system that responds to your actions, is largely what you make of it. Facebook has rolled out some tools to help you personalise it even more.

News Feed works on an algorithm rather than just a chronological stream of updates from all your friends and the pages you follow. It’s never been completely clear how to change what you see there. “The goal is to show content that matters and facilitate conversations,” says Adam Mosseri, Facebook’s Product Management Director for News Feed. “We want to give people more control over the News Feed experience. The idea is that if people have the right preferences settings, it’s good for everyone.”

News Feed Settings will now show a list of the top people, pages and groups that you’ve been seeing in your News Feed over the past few weeks. You can choose to sort by People, Pages or Groups posts, or see an overall summary. Unfollow any friend, page or group if you don’t want to see their stories in your News Feed. You can also see who you’ve unfollowed in the past and can choose to re-follow them anytime.

Now, you can decide on from whom you want to see lesser updates, rather than completely unfollowing them. It means, you won’t be inundated with updates from your friends, but you’ll still get major announcement posts, like the arrival of a new baby and so on. Also if you see a story you’re not interested in or don’t want to see, you can tap the arrow in the top right of that story to hide it. So, when you hide a story, you’ll have the option to see less from that person or page.

News Feed Settings are already available on desktop and mobile. The new options for giving feedback about your News Feed is live on the desktop, and it is coming to mobile in the coming weeks.