Recently we came across this question: “How do I find a list of ONLY the friends and pages I have selected as “See First”, not as part of the full friends and pages list to scroll through?”
What this frustrated user is talking about is that when you try to edit your list of friends and pages whose posts you have designated to see first in your newsfeed on Facebook (say because you want to remove some because you have hit Facebook’s limit for ‘see firsts’ of 30 and you want to add someone else to see first) you have to scroll through all of your friends to find the ‘see first’ friends, which, if you have a lot of friends, is a real pain.
The normal path that someone takes in order to see their list of ‘see first’ friends and pages goes something like this:
1. You (Facebook user) tried to add someone to their ‘see first’ list, and got this message:
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When you clicked on Edit List, it brought you to a full list (actually a ‘list’ of profile pictures and names) of all of your friends, with the ones who you currently have designated as ‘see first’ starred and highlighted in blue.
You remove someone from your ‘see first’ list by clicking on the star.
Once you have removed the people whom you wish to remove from your See First list, click on the ‘Confirm’ button.
Now, again, this is a real pain in the asterisk if you have a lot of friends (there is, after all, a 5000 friend limit on Facebook, and some people do have thousands of Facebook friends).
{Editorial sidenote: Do you think that Facebook has given new meaning to / changed / rewritten / perverted the definition of “friend”?}
There is, however, another way! And here it is!
How to Find, See, and Edit the List of the Friends and Pages You Have Selected to ‘See First’ on Facebook
From your home page, click on the menu dropdown (the upside-down triangle in the upper right-hand corner), and select “News Feed Preferences”.
From the News Feed Preferences pop-up, select ‘Prioritize who to see first’.
Now, as you can see, at first glance this screen looks just the same as doing it the first way, with your having to scroll through all of your friends.
However, there is one tiny difference, that is actually a big difference:
Click on that dropdown that says ‘All’, and… voila!
Select ‘People you see first’ and the view changes to just the people whom you have designated as ‘see first’.
From there, just click on the stars of the people that you want to remove from your ‘see first’ list, and then click on ‘Done’ to save the changes.
That’s all there is to it! Was this article helpful? Please let us know!
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That is a good/useful explainer.
And this management of only the people-you-want-to-see-first list, is an example of development missing the point. Any user who is frustrated enough to go to the trouble of raising an issue has often raised a VALID issue.
Too frequently a user raises an issue which is short-circuited into the category of “user error”. Development often misses getting an actionable issue. The real issue is that the path to a feature is not intuitive enough to be found typically. Application support should be generating bug reports for multiple issues about a missing capability regardless of whether the capability actually exists.
I will not stop, whenever I submit an issue for a productivity improvement and I am “schooled” that there already exists such a capable featured via some non intuitive path. Instead, I doubledown to convert the issue into a request for an intuitive access path to the feature that addresses my original suggestion. It is still a BUG if a feature exists and there are bug report submissions that never found that feature.
Mere existence of a feature is NOT an excuse to dismiss bug reports that are resolved by the feature. The user has probably already been frustrated looking for the solution. Each bug report reflects a user’s frustration and deserves attention, especially in aggregate.
Facebook added the filtered list of only, “See First” friends and made sure there is a path to use it. But Facebood did not adequately explore all typical use-cases that (especially in this case) begs for the use of this “See First” only list.