Is your Facebook feed also full of posts from shops, companies, and groups? Facebook announced a test this month to give users more power over who ends up on their feed. But can’t you already do something about it yourself?
Wiping your Facebook feed is a chore. If you really want to tackle it thoroughly, install an extension like News Feed Eradicator for Chrome, Edge and Firefox or Quiet Facebook on iOS, which completely empty your feed. Too drastic? Then, with a little patience, you can set up your feed to only see what you want to see — not what Facebook wants you to see.
Hide messages from friends without unfriending
You don’t have to be afraid of difficult conversations about why you unfriended someone on Facebook: following and becoming friends have been two separate things for years. If you unfollow someone, you remain friends – you will just no longer see messages from them in your News Feed.
The easiest way to do this is hidden in your settings menu. Click on the down arrow in the top right corner, choose ‘Settings’ and then ‘News Feed Preferences’.
Here you get a number of options. Unfollow opens a list of all your groups, friends, and likes. Simply click the blue button next to a page or friend: voila, you’ll never see them on your feed again. Do you regret? Then that can easily be solved. Under “Reconnect” in the “News Feed preferences” screen, you’ll find all of your unfollowed friends.
people snooze
A third option is to snooze people you would rather not hear from. Through the preferences menu you can only set whether you stop snoozing, or whether someone you’ve already put on pause wants to pause again.
To pause individual users or pages, something more is needed. Facebook has hidden this option better. If you only want to temporarily remove someone from your feed, you’ll need to look up a post from this person or group on your feed.
Click on the dots in the right corner, and you’ll get an option to ‘snooze’ someone for a month. At the end of the month, their posts will reappear on your feed. In this way you will also find ‘hide message’, so that you will see fewer such posts – but how exactly Facebook’s algorithm interprets this is always the question.
If you want to snooze a page, this option can also be found via the profile of the page. Under ‘Following settings’ you will find all options to determine how and whether you want to see something from these pages on your feed. Snoozing is part of that.
Finished? Congratulations: you have now set up your feed the way you prefer it to be.
Also clean Instagram right away
Instagram also tends to fill your feed with posts over time that you may not be interested in at all. In any case, it makes sense to regularly check your list of followed accounts. You can find this on your profile under ‘Following’. Handy: Instagram immediately shows which accounts you pay the least attention to.
Are there accounts that you don’t want to unfollow, but from which you don’t want to see messages for the time being? You can do something about that via the same ‘Following’ list.
Click on an account and select ‘Disable’. You will then be given the option to disable either the Stories or the posts on your feed from an Instagram account. Handy, especially for pages that post a Story every day and if possible pollute your Instagram experience. By the way, you will find disabled Stories again – at the very end of the series of stories.
Explore page
Finally, there’s the ‘Explore’ page. Instagram’s algorithm picks posts here based on your search history and interaction. You can mark individual messages as things you are ‘not interested’ in by pressing the three dots in the right corner of a message.
By the way, to get ‘Explore’ really clean, all you need to do is clear your search history. This option can be found under ‘Security’ in the settings menu. This way you have a cleaner Instagram experience in one fell swoop.
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