Hacksar

NOTE: Facebook has seemed to finally caught on and removed this page. This guide is no longer applicable and is here only for archival purposes.

If you use Facebook on a regular basis, you may have noticed that they have changed their layout once again. This is, I believe, version 3 of the Facebook layouts. Version 2, if you recall correctly, also had a huge uproar about the massive changes, introducing tabs and a Live News Feed. There were options to see more about people you like and less about people you don’t, and it was even smart enough to “learn” who your real friends were (as opposed to acquaintances you’ll never speak to again) and only show you their stories. But, people learned to live with that. It brought you the right amount of information, and most importantly, it was information that you actually cared about.

However, now version 3 of Facebook has done away with many of the new features introduced in version 2, making it much more simplistic and Twitter-like. I honestly don’t like this, because if I wanted a Twitter copy, I’d just use Twitter. Facebook had much more, but I don’t see that anymore. Another downgrade was the fact that they seemingly removed the whole “learning” part of the news feed; Facebook just shows you EVERY post done by EVERY friend all the time. It no longer shows only the people you may talk to, and so it’s giving much more information than is actually useful. Also, all of the updates are delayed by a good 10-20 minutes, whereas at least in Facebook v2, it would be within seconds/minutes.

Thankfully, I was able to find a way to reduce the number of wall posts showing up on my news feed drastically. I don’t care about somebody who I haven’t talked to in 5 years talking about how they skipped dinner to their other friend I haven’t even remember friending. It’s just taking up space on my news feed. Keep reading for the step by step guide on how to customize (to an extent) how much of different things shows up on your news feed.

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