Reset your sort preferences. Every few days.

by Volker Weber

Facebook wants to control the top stories on your timeline. That is the only way they can bubble up "sponsored" stories, read: adverts. You can set Facebook to show the most recent stories at the top of your timeline, but you have to do it time and again, since it's in Facebook's interest to not show recent stories at the top.

This is the indicator you are looking for:

Click it and you get this:

Select "Most Recent" and you get this:

If you see the first indicator again, you have to do it all over. You will never see "Sort: Top Stories" but always just "Sort".

2013-01-06 :: email :: twitter :: facebook :: google+

Comments

Und ich dachte, das wäre nur bei mir so.

Yves Luther, 2013-01-06 15:23

Wieso sollte das nur bei Dir so sein?

Volker Weber, 2013-01-06 15:37

What prevents them from injecting sponsored stories at the top of the "most recent" feed?

Yury Kats, 2013-01-06 16:23

It's a bit more delicate than that. If you subscribe to Pages, you don't get all the updates to those pages. Facebook bubbles up some of those updates. Then, as the Page owner, you can buy your place further up. This is the scheme that drove Marc Cuban out.

Volker Weber, 2013-01-06 17:07

And you get to do it EVERY time after you turn off your phone on the Android mobile version. I want to control what I want to see, not let Facebook do it through 'Top Stories'. There is already enough I am missing by sorting by Most Recent.

Don McNally, 2013-01-06 17:27

You can enforce the sort order by calling it with a special get parameter:

- "Most Recent" https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr
- "Top Stories" https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_nor

And there are user scripts for almost every browser.

It would be nicer though, if Facebook would respect and remember your preferences.

Christian Heindel, 2013-01-06 19:25

Remember, Christian Heindel, _you_ are the product. As in the super-market, the goods get no say on the order they are shelved.

Andreas Schoedl, 2013-01-06 19:40

to me, there was only one solution a long time ago:

delete facebook accout yes/no? -------------> yes!

Karl Heindel, 2013-01-07 10:40

Andreas, that's not strictly true. There are all kinds of shenanigans going on between supermarkets and goods suppliers in regards to shelf positioning. You can in most cases buy a good shelf position.

Armin Grewe, 2013-01-07 11:21

Because of that, and a lot of other things, I use "social fixer" for facebook. makes the whole thing much more tolerable.

Erik Hört, 2013-01-07 16:50

As Erik stated Social Fixer deals very effectively with these annoyances although I get the impresssion that it's a constant ware of attrition for the developer to keep on top of Facebook's 'evolution'.

David Eyre, 2013-01-07 19:07

I believe a way around this is to create a custom list. Someone else suggested this months back. I create a list called "Everyone", then added all Friends, Pages, and Subscriptions for the content I wish to see. From the phone or PC, when I open Facebook I can select the "Everyone" list and then I *do* see all of their posts.

It is constantly surprising to me (in a bad way) to compare what displays in my "Everyone" list vs what shows up in the default feed.

Joe Litton, 2013-01-08 15:52

It's a huge experiment. How fast can you boil the water without the frogs jumping out.

Volker Weber, 2013-01-08 16:02

I started using http://socialfixer.com/ a long time ago. It's a cat-and-mouse game with FB of course, but it makes it work my way instead of the FB way.

Dag Kvello, 2013-01-16 18:27

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