New Facebook Tools Make It Easier to Fine-Tune Your News Feed

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Maybe you heard about the guy who liked everything on Facebook for two days, and found it turned his feed into nothing he liked. (What a tool!) Facebook’s response to this was essentially: Well of course if you like a bunch of dumb stuff on Facebook your News Feed will fill up with even more dumb stuff. That’s because News Feed, a self regulating system that responds to your actions, is largely what you make it. Today, Facebook is rolling out tools to help you personalize it even more.

News Feed tries to learn from everything you’ve done in the past to inform what it shows you in the future. Take an action on something you see—like it, comment on it, banish it—and Facebook will try to learn from your behavior. Comment on a friend’s photo, and you’ll see more of them down the road. Hide a post, and it will try to show you fewer updates of a similar ilk.

But News Feed can also be mysterious, particularly because there’s an algorithm at work 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.

Which explains why Facebook is rolling out tools and revamped user preferences designed to not only give you more control over what appears in your News Feed, but also to understand why that stuff is appearing there.

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“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.”

One of the main ways this shows up is in the options you get when you see something you don’t like from a person, page, or group. You’ve long been able to unfollow on Facebook, which keeps things from showing up in the News Feed without severing the relationship. Now, before you go to full on unfollowing, you can opt instead to just see less, which does exactly what it sounds like. It means you won’t be inundated with every baby picture your friend takes, for example, but you’ll still get major life announcement posts, like the arrival of a new baby.

If you do unfollow a person or page, Facebook now has a centralized page where you can see all of those unfollows in one place. That’s designed to help you easily re-add someone down the road who you may have just wanted to turn off temporarily. It also shows you the people you interact with the most, which is super interesting if not completely actionable at the moment.

Mosseri emphasized that these are just initial steps, and that the long term goal is to really help you dial in your News Feed. In short, it thinks no one is a better judge of what should appear in your feed than you, and so it wants to keep on giving you the tools to do that.