With Facebook turning 10 recently, you may have realised just how long you've been a part of the social network yourself. In that time, you probably made friends with lots and lots of people for many different reasons — some may not be very relevant anymore. It's probably time to clean up your feed, isn't it?

Unfollow People

It used to be that you'd "hide" stuff by others in order to stop seeing their stuff in your news feed. These days, the best way to stop seeing updates from a person is to "unfollow" them. You may think of Facebook following as something that happens to celebrities and the like (and it is), but it's also a tool for managing your own Facebook friends.

Unfollow-person

In this situation, unfollowing a friend will ensure you stay "Facebook Friends" with them, but you'll never see their updates in your feed. Ever. This is the perfect solution for that person you met at a party but barely know, for the aquaintance who ended up dating your ex, and of course, for your ex. You know, those people who you have a reason to stay friends with, but would rather not actively engage with most of the time. Unfollow them and you'll avoid all the drama of unfriending, while also forgetting they are even there on your friends list. Brilliant.

You can also create friends lists to manage what these people see of your profile, which updates they see, and to hide from them in chat if you need to. You don't want to unfollow them only to forget that they can see what you write! Personally, I also rely on my friends lists to view my news feed. I almost never view the full feed, as I've bookmarked my favourite friends list instead. In my opinion, this is the ideal way to see just what you want from Facebook.

Take A Survey

When you see an advert, game or other update that you don't care for much, the first thing you probably do is to right click to "hide" the post (or unfollow the person who put it there). Most people know by now that you can "hide" everything from a certain application using this trick. But there's a new tool in this menu nowadays: Take A Survey.

Facebook Unfollow

When you take the survey, Facebook throws you a handful of posts and asks you to rate them according to how commercial you think it is and the like. This teaches Facebook about what you like, but also presumably teaches Facebook about what sort of content people and Pages are regularly producing, thus determining their Page Edgerank and cleaning up everyone's feeds a little. Facebook needs this information to make your feed better, as most people can't possibly care about everything their friends and liked Pages have to say.

Facebook-survey-c

Don't Auto-Play Videos Unless On Wi-Fi

You may have also noticed Facebook is now auto-playing videos for us in our news feeds, most probably with the plan of playing adverts at us soon. This is unavoidable if you want to keep using Facebook, but it is something you can turn off when using mobile data.

In your Facebook app on your phone or tablet, there should be an option in the settings to turn off autoplay videos if you're not using Wi-Fi. That at least should help your phone bill, and will also clean your news feed a bit when your out ad about. We can only hope that one day we'll be able to turn off autoplay for videos fully.

What are your favourite tricks for cleaning up your Facebook news feed?