This post by Kurt Wagner originally appeared on Mashable on 1/19/14. The post explains recent changes to the Facebook news feed design, and what users can do to control the content shown there.
Baby photos. News articles. Selfies. Advertisements. Job announcements.
It’s likely your Facebook News Feed contains some combination of these, if not all of them (and likely other categories, too). That’s both the beauty and the curse of News Feed: It provides updates from all aspects of your life in one place, including those you may not care to see.
In March, Facebook announced a News feed redesign. Mark Zuckerberg told press, “What we are trying to give everyone is a copy of the best personalized newspaper in the world.” The redesign has since stumbled, but the goal of turning Facebook into a “personalized newspaper” remains strong. And Facebook could use your help.
Mashable sat down with Greg Marra, Facebook’s product manager for News Feed, to discuss how users can best curate the content that they see in News Feed. The easiest way to change what you see? Engage with content, says Marra.
“The basic interactions of News Feed are some of the most important signals that we get,” he explains. “Unfortunately, those interactions aren’t able to capture everything that we want to know, so we also give people additional controls to tell us things we can’t figure out just from normal usage of News Feed.”
Here’s what we learned.
If You Want to Stop Seeing Posts From a Facebook Friend…
If you’re cold-blooded, eliminating News Feed posts from an annoying friend or ex-flame is simple: Unfriend them. But many people don’t have the heart to completely eliminate someone from their Facebook life.
Click here to read the full article on Mashable.