Visit your Facebook home page (not the Profile tab). Toward the top of your page, you should see, “News Feeds.” To the right of that, you should see, “Top News,” and, “Most Recent.” Top News will probably be bold, meaning that’s what you’re currently viewing, and Most Recent should be blue, indicating that you can click it to view it.
You can’t manually do much to the Top News. Facebook has an algorithm that determines what it thinks will be top news for you. You can influence it through your interactions, but I wouldn’t purposely try to hack it. You won’t get very far.
You can manually change your Most Recent feed, though. Click the Most Recent button, the one I said would be blue. Once you’re viewing your Most Recent feed, scroll to the very bottom of the page. Sometimes Facebook will automatically jump to showing you more items, so you might need to scroll to the bottom twice.
At the bottom of the Most Recent feed, you’ll see two links: Older Posts, which will show you more items, and Edit Options, which will take you where you won’t to go for this. So go ahead and click Edit Options.
A pop-up box News Feed settings will display. This is where you can manually set who shows in your Most Recent feed.
There’s a number at the bottom of the box. Usually, it’s set to 150 or 250. Problem is, if you have more friends than that, Facebook automatically decides which friends’ updates to show you. In other words, if you have more friends than that number shows, the Most Recent feed isn’t necessarily showing the most recent activity on Facebook.
So, I suggest changing that number at the bottom to 5,000. Facebook doesn’t allow anyone to have more than 5,000 friends, so setting it to that number ensures that all your friends will show up. So change that number and then click save.
Now go to the top of your web browser and click the refresh bottom. This button varies from browser to browser, but hopefully you know what it looks like.
Once you’ve refreshed the page, your Most Recent feed should show all your friends’ most recent updates. If you have a lot of friends, take a moment to enjoy this amazingness.
Okay, great. Now it’s time to start pruning. You can do that on your News Feeds by clicking the X in the top right corner of any entry (you can’t see the X unless you hover your cursor over the entry). This doesn’t defriend anyone. It just hides them from your feed. And if you ever want them back in again, you can change that through the News Feed Settings pop-up box I just told you about.
- Sometimes certain friends just tend to post boring statuses, saying, “I’m bored. Text me,” or something like that. You might consider hiding those friends.
- Other friends post way too often with stuff you’re not really interested in. You might consider hiding those friends too.
- Still others are the things you’ve LIKED on Facebook. Sometimes it’s great to get updates from the brands and you like – other times you could do without the promo for Coka-Cola or whatever. You might consider hiding those updates (if you don’t want to just visit the page and unLIKE them altogether).
Pruning is an ongoing process, but over time, your Facebook new feeds will fit more and more with what you actually want to see, regardless of who you’re friends with. So now you can stay friends with people even if you don’t want to read their not-so-amazing updates all the time.
If you have a lot of friends or only a few, this will make your Facebook experience a lot more enjoyable. Just what you needed, right? :>)
