If you're an active Facebook user, there's a good chance you've been taking steps to cultivate your News Feed, lest it become a cluttered mess of selfies from fringe acquaintances or ridiculous pictures and links shared by your older family members. Facebook has been trying to improve its News Feed for some time now, and today today the company is giving users more granular controls to make their experience on the site more useful.
Essentially, Facebook is rolling out a more in-depth settings menu for the News Feed: for starters, you can now choose to "see less" from your friends on Facebook, rather than unfollow them entirely. Previously, when you tapped a story in your feed, you could choose to stop receiving updates from that friend, but now you can just tell Facebook to tone it down a little bit.
There's also a new master view that lets you quickly see everyone you're following and everyone you've unfollowed so that you can swap people in and out of those groups. That goes for any pages or groups, as well, so if there's a #brand you've liked that is overly noisy on your feed, you can shut them up and get on with your life. Of course, you could also just "unlike" that page as well, but more control is generally a good thing.
Facebook says its new settings menu is rolling out today on the desktop and on mobile, so you should have the option to "see less" from your friends soon. We're not sure exactly how Facebook's algorithms will decide how much content to show you from friends you've decided to de-prioritize, but it's worth a shot for those friends who just post far too much stuff.