Facebook's News Feed has always been a mystery to many users. Some may find it weird why Facebook decides to show them breakfast photos of people from high school but doesn't provide updates to a favorite cousin living 1,600 miles away.
Now, Facebook has decided to give its users a bit of control when it comes to choosing who and what they want to see on their News Feed.
On Nov. 7, Facebook product manager Greg Marra announced in a blog post that Facebook is rolling out new features that let users manage which posts from friends, Pages and Groups they want to see on the News Feed.
In the past, users could already unfollow people they did not want to hear from without having to unfriend or unlike them just by clicking on the chevron on the upper right corner of a person's post and unfollowing that user, or by hiding the specific story from the News Feed. The process, however, was tedious because it only let users unfollow one person or story at a time.
With the new Facebook News Feed settings, which can be accessed from the "Settings" menu, users can now manage all the people they follow from a single page. The settings will show users only the friends, Pages and Groups they have interacted with the most and follow or unfollow them. Users will also see a list of all the people they have unfollowed and be given the option to refollow them in the future.
Facebook also added a few tweaks to the settings on individual News Feed posts, which still let users unfollow a person or hide a story. With the new option, Facebook will now let users see fewer posts from that person but not completely unfollow them so that they still get to hear from them from time to time, just not all the time.
"What you do in News Feed helps determine what you see in News Feed," says Marra. "You decide who you want to connect to, and what pages and public figures you want to follow."
It's important to note, however, that Facebook is not giving users full control over what they see on the News Feed, as Facebook's mysterious News Feed algorithm that is based on the user's interactions on the social network still decides which "high-quality content" users should see. Facebook says it has been working on tweaking its algorithm and succeeding, as users are spending more time scrolling through their News Feeds.
During Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's live question-and-answer with the public on Nov. 6, he said his ultimate goal was to make Facebook the "perfect, personalized newspaper for everyone in the world."
The new settings started rolling out for web and mobile and will come to the Android and iOS versions in the next few days.
