VKontakte’s filter vs. lists on Facebook and Twitter

Many of us suffer from feed addic­tion: every N units of time we check the feeds of our pro­files on var­i­ous social networks. VKontakte, the Russian-language social net­work, good old Facebook, hip­ster Pinterests and the by now fairly main­stream Tumblr, not to men­tion niche and top­i­cal ser­vices… They are beyond counting.

Some people real­ize how harm­ful this habit is. I’ve long “lived” on FB (Facebook) and Twitter, and only recently started a pro­file on VK (VKontakte) too. I’d like to draw the public’s atten­tion to a useful dif­fer­ence I recently dis­cov­ered between VKontakte and the other feed-making services.

Many people learned long ago to orga­nize lists of “friends” and sub­scrip­tions, but only VKontakte can actu­ally filter the feed, that is, by default (on the home page) show only selected posts. Here’s how.

1. Create a small list of your clos­est friends, whose updates you def­i­nitely don’t want to miss (photos from the office party, yeah): My Friends → “Create a list” in the right-hand column.
2. Go back to the home page, which long ago became http://vk.com/feed, that is, the news feed. Under the status field, on the right, find the little “Filter” button and choose the list you created.
3. Voilà! Now com­pul­sively refresh­ing VKontakte loses its uncon­scious pull: news shows up very rarely → the bad habit gives ground.

It helps me. Give it a try.

UPD: It turns out not all users have these filters. The net­work’s admin­is­tra­tors are test­ing the feature. They took mine away :(