There is some truth to this viral “OMG it worked” Facebook scam. You do seem to see only posts and updates from the same 25 or so friends. But you can change that and not by copying and pasting a post. This trick can even remove ads from your Facebook feed.
Facebook added a “Feeds” option, but not many people know about it or have forgotten it's there. You’ll find it by tapping on your photo at the bottom of the screen. You’ll then see at the top of the page a few options. All, Favorites, Friends, Groups, and Pages.
On a computer, you’ll find ‘feeds’ on the left side of the timeline.
Tapping or clicking on ‘Friends” shows posts from all of your friends in chronological order. The latest posts are shown first. “Favorites” are friends you’ve chosen as people you want to see the most.
If you haven’t set up a list of Favorite friends, Facebook did it for you based on its algorithm.
Friends are added here because you interact with them the most. You’ve shared Messages, liked their posts, or you have a large number of mutual friends.
You can change your list of Favorites by searching for them and marking them as favorites. You can only have 30 favorites on your list, so you must remove some first. Don’t worry, you’ll stay friends, they just won’t be a BFF and they won’t know you’ve replaced them.
When you choose to see your “Favorites” feed, not only will you see those friends, but I’ve found you’ll see far fewer ads.
When I looked at the basic ‘home feed’, 30% of what showed up were sponsored ads.
But choosing to see only my friends or favorites, there were no ads. None at all.
You can also change who you see the most on Facebook by leaving likes on their posts which will tweak Facebook’s algorithm. Facebook weighs reactions more than likes or ‘thumbs up’. The heart emoji and angry emoji carry more influence on what you see. This will take a while to change the algorithm but it does work.
The only downside to changing your Favorites feed is that it’s time-consuming. You’ll have to search for each friend you want to add to the list but if you’re interested sometimes in seeing just a certain few friends and you don’t want to see ads covering up your Facebook timeline, it’s worth the effort.
