Technology

It's starting to make the rounds again through my Facebook feed so I hopefully I'll take a moment and circumvent the useless and misleading instructions for how to make Facebook do what you want it to do on your feed. The gist of the post goes a little something like this:

Hello just doing what everyone else is doing. Fixing my blocked posts. I wondered where everybody had been! This is good to know. It's ridiculous to have 331 friends and only 25 are allowed to see posts. I ignored this post earlier because I didn’t think it worked. It WORKS!! I have a whole new news feed. I’m seeing posts from people I haven’t seen in years. Here’s how to bypass the system FB now has in place that limits posts on your news feed. Their new algorithm chooses the same few people - about 25 - who will read your posts. So, hold your finger down anywhere in this post and "copy" will pop up. Click "copy". Then go to your page, start a new post, and put your finger anywhere in the blank field. "Paste" will pop up and click "paste". This will bypass the system.
If you are reading this message, do me a favor and leave me a quick comment...a "hello," a sticker, whatever you want, so you will appear in my newsfeed It WORKS!! I don’t know how many friends I have. I just want to see all of your posts that I have been missing. We shall see....hello.
Might as well have a go. Because all I see now days is advertising rubbish and politics.

or

Just start I would like to thank Everyone for telling me how to do the bypass. I wondered where everybody had been!
This is good to know: It's ridiculous to have over 397 friends and only 25 are allowed to see my posts.
It WORKS!! I have a whole new newsfeed. I’m seeing posts from people I haven’t seen in years.
Here’s how to bypass the system FaceBook now has in place that limits posts on your newsfeed.
Their new algorithm chooses the same few people - about 25 - who will read your posts. Therefore,
Hold your finger down anywhere in this post and "copy" will pop up. Click "copy". Then go to your page, start a new post, and put your finger anywhere in the blank field. "Paste" will pop up, then click paste.
This will bypass the system.
If you are reading this message, do me a favor and leave me a quick comment...a "hello," a sticker, whatever you want, so you will appear in my newsfeed Good to see everyone!

or... some other variation of the above.

This is a misunderstood fallacy.

What you are in effect doing when you follow these steps is actively engaging with the content someone shared on their page. That is one of the factors that Facebook uses in their algorithm to determine what posts to display in your feed with any kind of priority. It defaults to the people you engage with most. So, you're just tweaking the algorithm they already use for the most part.

Now, caveat... Facebook is not offering this service as a charity or some benevolent contribution to humanity. They're trying to make money. I like to say, if you're not paying for a service, then YOU are what's being sold... your eyeballs, your attention, etc. So, content being boosted by paid advertising is going to show up in your feed regardless of what you do. Don't like it? Go develop your own multi-billion-dollar social media network and you can call all the shots.

One trick you can do that helps a little bit is use this URL to do as much as you can to force Facebook to show you content on your wall in some sort of chronological order (https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr) Save that link to your favorites so you can always click on it and jump right to that display format.