We all have those friends. The ones that we don’t want to unfriend, but tend to drive us nuts with photos of babies or reposts that are nothing more than linkbait.

Until now, if you had any of these friends in your news feed, you had the choice to unfriend them or simply stop getting their updates, and neither of these choices were particularly great. Facebook has just changed all of this, though, and now you can make better news feed decisions.

Selective Reading

The new Facebook mobile and desktop app now lets you choose which friends you want to get more updates from, and which friends you want to see less from. Instead of blocking out people completely, all you have to do now is simply choose to “see less” from them. You can, of course, see more too, but that’s up to you.

So, let’s say that you have a friend that posts a bunch of stuff you can’t stand to see every day, but you want to see some of the things that person posts occasionally. With the new app update, you can see some of the news feed items that person posts, but you don’t have to see everything.

You can still choose to block a person completely from your news feed, but you no longer have to do this. You can also go over the list of people that you follow. If you decided to block someone’s updates from your news feed a long time ago, you can start adding in some of those updates to your feed once again.

The Purpose

Facebook wants to give its users more control over news feeds. Since users don’t necessarily want to block people completely from a feed, it makes sense that users now have more control over what is and isn’t seen without getting rid of some updates completely. This update also gives you the chance to go over the list of people that you might have blocked before and add those people back to your feed.

The opposite is also true, of course, and you can completely block anyone that really annoys you without unfriending them - or, you can just unfriend them. Do you really need seven-hundred Facebook friends anyway? Some speculate that the social network is losing its popularity grip (especially with millennials that aren’t so keen on the data that Facebook generates regularly), and that’s why Facebook needs to make these adjustments.

Being able to see what you do and don’t prefer is also a great way for the company to gather even more data, so that’s another reason why Facebook is making these changes.

How to Change Your Feed

All of these new adjustments can be found in your News Feed settings menu. Just click on the menu wheel, and you will see the list of people that you do and don’t follow. If you live in the U.S. (spreading to the rest of the world soon), you can access the new settings through the desktop app now, but most people will see the new options via the mobile app for the time being.