How to revive your Facebook News Feed

| Published: Wednesday, September 26, 2018, 8:05 [IST]

Facebook. It made waves when it launched, it continued to make waves as it grew. Fourteen years and they still appear to be in the business of wave making. The void that opens up at every boring moment during a break or while traveling is often filled up by Facebook. The odd thing is that opening up Facebook can be quite an unpleasant experience if the posts that appear on your Newsfeed is inconsistent with your preferences and tastes. The unfortunate thing is what appears on your feed on you.

This might seem odd since you would know what you like and don’t, but the root cause of the problem is that Facebook uses a complex algorithm that determines your political stance. Since it is impossible to cram everything that has ever been posted on to your news feed once, Facebook aims to curate the content that is made available to you. Facebook prioritizes posts that have been shared by your family or friends. Posts get priority within your feed must have the following characteristics:

1) Your family members or friends interacting with a post from another friend of yours.

2) Comments posted to a post that one of your friends has shared.

3) Activity on a video or article that has been shared by your friend.

The key factors that influence what you see on Facebook are your actions and whatever your Facebook friends are posting.

Some of the steps that you can do to revive your Facebook news feed are as follows:

Groups

Click the drop-down in your menu bar and then Manage Groups. Click on Groups and then go through all the groups that you have joined over the years. If you come across any controversial or political groups that you think might be responsible for toxifying your feed, click on the Gear icon, and then choose Leave Group.

Pages

The next thing that you need to do is look at all the Facebook Pages that you have liked. Go to your Facebook homepage, click on Pages in the left navigation menu, and then hit Liked Pages.

Repeat the same exercise as before. Go through the list. You will be able to see all the pages that you have liked over the years. There might be quite a few gems in this list that might be doing heaps to improve the toxicity of your feed. Select the lucky winners and go over to the pages, go all the way to the top of the page and you will see Liked and Following buttons. Click on Liked and then Unlike this Page. After this, click on Following and Unfollow the page.

Newsfeed

After you are done with the Groups and Pages, it's time to roll up your sleeves and deal with the nitty-gritty. Go through your news feed and identify the bad eggs in the bunch. When you find posts that you find controversial or toxic, click on the three dots on the upper-right corner of the post and then choose Hide post from the menu.

There, if you have done the above, your Facebook news feed will be in tip-top shape in no time.