Probably many of us have noticed the “Possible Friends”
, but not everyone knows what it is for and how it works. This is exactly what this article will discuss.
Possible Friends tab looks like.
, perhaps someone did not notice her.
How many of those who know about it have guessed how this function works, and by what principle it identifies people with whom we may be familiar? Everything is very simple. Let's open this section and study it in more detail. Having done this, you will notice that most of the people who are there are those with whom we communicated, but did not add them as friends, or we have mutual friends with them. Now it’s a little clearer how this function works, but that’s not all.
This list is first created based on people with whom you have mutual friends. What follows is a whole chain. We look for those users whose profile indicates the same city as yours, the same job, and other factors. That is, it is a smart algorithm that constantly updates the list of your possible friends. Let's say you added someone as a friend and immediately, from his list of friends, there will be those who have common friends with you, and they will be offered to you as your possible acquaintances. This is the whole principle of how the “Possible Friends”
.
Of course, it is impossible to obtain accurate and reliable information. Only the developers of the VKontakte site know this. It can be assumed that VK collects anonymized data that is tied to an identifier, or buys it from other networks. But this is just an assumption, and do not be afraid, your personal data is not collected.
By what principle does VKontakte identify important friends?
When forming a list of important friends, the algorithm takes into account the following factors:
- how often do you correspond with the user;
- how often do you visit his page;
- how often do you leave about and comments under user posts.
In addition, if you recently added a person, he will also appear in the top, but not higher than the important ones identified by the algorithm. If you don’t have much contact with the user, he will gradually drop down the list. This is one of the options for removing a person from your important friends on VKontakte. By the same principle, you can, on the contrary, be active in relation to other users, like and leave comments so that their rating increases and they rise to the place of an uninteresting user in the list of important ones. But both the first and second methods require a lot of time.
Let's look at more effective and simpler methods.
How to see hidden friends on VKontakte from PC and phone
If you want to see hidden friends on your profile, then to do this you need to go to the privacy settings from your computer or phone and look at the people in the “Who is visible in the list of my friends and subscriptions” section.
Difficulties arise when you need to see a stranger’s hidden VKontakte friends. In general, you can use the website 220vk.com, which helps you find out all the answers, but it doesn’t always work.
Go to the site and paste the link to the profile of the person whose hidden friends you want to see. Perhaps the page analysis will give a positive result.
So you’ve figured out ways to hide VKontakte friends and how to view them from your phone or computer. I repeat once again that there used to be a script that helped to implement all this, but the developers of the social network are not asleep and are constantly “sewing up” holes that, in principle, do not affect anything.
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First way
To do this, follow these instructions on how to remove a user from important VKontakte friends:
- Go to the “News” section and find the post of the person you want to remove from important ones. If a person rarely posts anything, go to his page and select any post.
- Click on the ellipsis in the upper right corner of the recording block.
- From the list that appears, select “This is not interesting.”
Ready! Wait a few hours (8 to 24) for the system to update the user's information and lower their rating.
Second way
The second way to remove a person from your important friends on VKontakte solves the problem radically. To do this, you just need to remove it. If there is a need to save contacts, then add the person again. The user will not receive notifications about your actions, and he will not know anything, and will be left off your list.
Keep in mind that if you continue to be active with the user you want to remove from important, soon his rating will increase and he will again take his place in the list. And remember: although it is useful to know how to remove unwanted users from important VKontakte friends, the order of friends in reality is much more important than the order of friends on the social network.
The social network’s algorithms work in such a way that they monitor the user’s possible surroundings. Based on the number of mutual friends, page views, likes, reposts and other data, the system offers a list of people who may be familiar to you. Sometimes this turns out to be very useful, and sometimes it simply gets in the way. In this article we will look at how to remove friends from VK using a standard and third-party tool.
In cases where you need to remove only a few users from the list of possible friends, we recommend using the standard VKontakte functionality. The operation is performed according to the following algorithm:
- Log in to your account and go to the "Friends" section.
- In the corresponding block on the right, click “Show all”.
- Hover the cursor over the avatar of the person you want to delete and click the cross.
If you need to hide a block so that it does not appear when viewing a page with friends, you will have to use a third-party extension that is installed in the browser.
What are recommendations in VK and how they work
Recommendations are a section with content that is tailored to your preferences. VKontakte artificial intelligence monitors what you read, like, comment, repost and, based on this, creates a personal feed. Recommendations are available in the web version of the social network and in the mobile application, but the sections are different.
Desktop
There are 4 types of recommendations here.
Posts
This is a feed with posts that may be of interest to you. To watch it, go to the “News” section. On the right is a block, which is also called “News”, below is the “Recommendations” section. Click on it.
This section displays posts that may be of interest to us. You can hide, save, and subscribe to notifications for certain posts.
Click on the arrow in the right corner of the publication and select what you need:
- this is not interesting - the post will no longer be shown in your recommendations;
- save to bookmarks - when you need to save a specific post;
- complain - the post will not only be hidden, VK admins will receive a complaint about it;
- notify about posts—enables notifications about new posts in this group.
Groups
To see recommended communities, click on “Communities” on the left, and “Popular Communities” in the block on the right. They can be filtered by category.
Below them is the “Recommended Communities” block with individual recommendations.
Friends
Recommended friends are displayed in the feed with recommended posts almost at the very beginning - after the first post.
And if you go to the “Friends” section, the “Possible Friends” block will appear on the right.
This section includes people with whom you have mutual friends, with similar interests, and those with whom you have at least once been in contact.
Music
Go to the “Music” section and click on “Recommendations”.
There are a lot of sections here - new releases, new albums, charts, recently listened to, categories (pop, rock), editor's choice and others. But not all tracks are created taking into account your musical preferences. Often, in the music recommendations sections there are simply popular performers or those who have an agreement with VK.
Mobile (VK application)
The recommendations in the application differ from the desktop version - there is only a smart feed - Interesting and thematic feeds.
Interesting
To go to Interesting, click on the square in the lower left corner.
And then the “For You” button. Interesting posts are displayed here.
Thematic feed and experts
If you scroll Interesting to the left, content categories appear at the top - this thematic feed. For example, you can watch content only on the topic of tourism or IT.
The selection of content for thematic feeds is carried out by experts - first the AI collects the content, then the experts select the best from it. Almost any VK user can become an expert - the conditions are simple, you need to submit an application in the closed VK public.
The method of selecting a thematic feed with the help of random people has already been criticized by ordinary VK users and some experts. Because in most cases, content is selected not based on objective indicators, but on the basis of personal preferences.
Removal via AdBlock
The procedure using this extension will require the following steps (using Google Chrome as an example):
- Launch the browser.
- In the menu, select “Additional tools”, then “Extensions”.
- A list of already installed add-ons will open. To go to the store to search, you need to click on the three horizontal bars at the top left and select “Open Chrome Online Store.”
- Perform a search using the keyword – AdBlock.
- Click the “Install” button, confirm the action and wait for the process to complete. An extension icon will appear at the top.
- Go to the page with the “Possible
- Click on the extension icon and select “Block element”.
- Place the cursor over the block so that it is highlighted in yellow, then left-click.
- In the pop-up window, click “Add”.
Everything is ready, now this block will not be displayed when visiting the page.
Reference. To return the list back, you need to open the add-on settings and go to the “Advanced” section. Here, in the “My filter list” column, you need to find the code that is responsible for the display and delete it. Finally, don’t forget to click the “Save” button. After reloading the page, the block will return to its place.
Alternatives
Previously, there was a method that made it possible to disable a block by writing your own CSS style for the VKontakte website (for example, through the Styler extension). Now it has stopped working because the structure of the social network pages has been changed. It is not possible to separately prohibit the display of the “friends_possible_block” element - all the content disappears at once, leaving only the side menu. Based on this, using extensions like AdBlock is the only option to get rid of the unwanted block of possible friends.
The article discusses options for how to remove the list of possible friends from the VKontakte website. The user can choose to use a standard social network tool or block using a third-party extension.
Now we have to talk about the fact that one additional function of the VKontakte social network has appeared: “Possible friends”. This service will serve as an assistant for finding possible comrades; everything here has already been thought out extremely well. In this section you will see a huge number of users with whom you are familiar.
"VKontakte": friends - location
There have been some changes. The usual VKontakte function “Possible Friends” has disappeared due to unnecessary use - now acquaintances can be found using the “Search for People” button. After clicking on this button, you will immediately see a list of people who may be your friends. Essentially, this should make it easier for users to work with VKontakte. Behind brevity, as a rule, lies talent. We will look at this innovation later. Also, in addition to this new function, a kind of book with phone numbers has now been created in the “Friends” section, where you can see the contacts of people who interest you.
The principle of sorting “Possible friends”
Administrators and developers of this popular social network among young people, of course, do not receive their salaries in vain. They constantly want to improve VK and make it as convenient as possible for communication and information exchange, so new features and functions are constantly appearing. And now, as we just said, the “Possible Friends” feature has appeared.
But on what principle does this blue button work? Among users there are many versions with answers to this question, but the true one is probably known only to developers. Most likely, this list includes only those people who are already your friends.
That is, for example, if you studied with them at the same educational institution, and also graduated in the same year, then, of course, they will be shown as your possible friends if you click on the specified link. If a certain person is listed as a friend not only by one of your friends, but by several, then the likelihood that he will also be on this list is quite high.
The developers made sure that possible friends were represented in the most complete list thanks to the “show others” button. However, many users, when they clicked on this button, received the same people they had already seen in the list earlier, just in a different order.
Of course, someone was luckier and found many friends and acquaintances on this list. Some users have reported 95% effectiveness of the feature. And for some, no matches were found at all. That is, complete strangers were included in the list. But this may happen because there are several people on your friends list that you don't know. Consequently, there cannot be anyone on their list who would be familiar to you.
How to hide friends on VKontakte (in mobile version)
To hide friends, go to the “Settings” section. Then select "Privacy".
There you need to find “Who is visible in the list of my friends and subscriptions” among the available items.
Then the steps should be the same as when hiding friends in the PC version. That is, you need to select friends whose hiding is planned.
After completing the above manipulations, your hidden friends will be visible exclusively to you (in particular, if you correctly configure the item “Who can see my hidden friends”).
VKontakte: “Possible friends” have disappeared
Recently, the Internet has literally exploded with messages that “Possible Friends” on VKontakte have disappeared. Everyone is wondering where exactly this function disappeared? In the previous order, they appear only to users who have just registered, but here’s the problem: as soon as their list of friends is replenished to at least one hundred, “Possible Friends” disappear.
If you don’t know how to look at possible VKontakte friends, remember that now you can find this undoubtedly useful function by clicking on the “Friends” column in the left list, and then on “Search” on the right side of the screen. The search will show only those people with whom you have many mutual friends, since the VKontakte administration decided that this would be much more convenient and efficient to work with the site.
This feature is certainly useful, but it just needs a little improvement. There are users who have hidden their friends in their privacy settings. So how to deal with them then? They think that only they can see their hidden friends, but no, in fact, in Possible Friends a complete stranger can see that they are on your list. After all, the VKontakte “Possible Friends” function in any case takes into account users hidden from prying eyes, and developers definitely need to think about this.
What recommendations can be removed from VK?
It is impossible to completely remove this section from the site menu. If you don't like the way it works, just don't go inside.
Let's look at what recommendations in VK can be reset:
- About the actions of people who, according to VKontakte algorithms, should be interesting to you;
- About new entries and posts in communities similar to those you were previously interested in or subscribed to;
- About future events and events, birthdays (can be disabled through the profile settings menu).
The mobile application also contains blocks of recommended friends and communities, which are displayed in each of the sections of the same name. They appear right under the list of already approved contacts and groups, and if you are interested in how to disable these particular recommendations in VK on your phone, alas, we will disappoint you - this is impossible. All you have to do is not pay attention to them, that’s all.
The desktop version also has “Possible Friends” and “Recommended Communities” blocks, but they are displayed on the right side of the large screen in a small sector, almost invisible, and therefore do not irritate the eye.
There are also music recommendations in VK; they are located in the “Music” section in a separate tab, and they cannot be removed.
This concludes our instructions. Now you know how to manage your recommended content feed and how to turn off unnecessary notifications. Remember, this is just an additional option designed to help you quickly find interesting people and publications in the vast expanses of VKontakte. However, you are under no obligation to monitor, configure or control it. Just don't go there. By the way, unnecessary news from the regular feed can be removed by similarly clicking on the daw entry and selecting the “Hide” command.
