If you often get frustrated over noticing an exciting new post on Facebook much later than everyone else, simply because Facebook algorithms decided that you wouldn’t actually be that interested in seeing it, then good news: Facebook is rolling out updates handing users better and more direct controls over the type of content that appears prominently on their newsfeeds.
As Facebook explains in its own article announcing the updates today, the stream of stories that appears in a user’s newsfeed is personalized; it ranks stories posted by friends and Pages based on factors including whom you generally interact most with and the types of posts that you often like and comment on.
However, the social media site is now bringing in several useful changes. The most significant of the new features is Prioritize Who to See First, which enables a user to assign distinctive blue stars to friends whose posts they never want to miss. Facebook will respond by having those friends’ posts appear higher in newsfeeds.
More changes are explained in Facebook’s aforementioned article, and the changes will be first enacted for the Facebook iOS app today. Facebook has not specified a more specific update time than this; indeed, as we write this, the app has yet to be updated in the App Store. The Android app and desktop Facebook, the social media site pledges, will get the changes “over the coming weeks”.