Facebook is making good on Mark Zuckerberg's dream to provide a user-friendly, personalized social media network and giving users more control over their news feeds.
The new controls allow users to see fewer posts from a particular person without removing them completely from the news feed or unfriending them.
"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," said the company in a statement. "Starting today, when you hide a story you'll have the option to ask to see less from that person or Page."
The tool will also allow users to unfollow a friend, hiding all updates that they post. If a user later decides that they want to follow that friend again, they can choose to do so.
Facebook has been adding more controls for users who want to personalize their social media experience ever since Adam Mosseri began overseeing the news feed development team in August.
"If we're showing you something you're not interested in, we're not doing our job the way we should be doing it," said Mosseri in an interview.
Facebook is also offering users a new control, which is called "News Feed settings." This control allows users to see whose posts they saw most frequently in the last week, as well as who they have unfollowed. It is here that users can re-follow a person or a page. The controls are available on both the desktop and mobile versions of Facebook. The feature will be added to the apps in the coming weeks.
Facebook's plan is simple. It wants people to spend more time on the network, so they see more ads and Facebook makes more money. In a Q&A that Mark Zuckerberg gave recently, the young CEO said "with News Feed, our goal is to build the perfect, personalized newspaper for everyone in the world."
Facebook may be a long way from that goal, but it certainly is getting better. Some fixes that are expected to the News Feed in the future are simple, such as changing the design of the arrow that is next to each post to make it easier to see.
Some fixes are much more complicated. The News Feed has an algorithm that takes hundreds of different factors into consideration. This ensures that users do not see every single post that their friends make, but only the ones that a user could potentially be interested in.
