So, with spamming being less of a threat to Facebook, it’s looking to make such improvements to the content of its news feed, bringing out content that the user likes and is drawn to. And that’s the difference between you checking Facebook when you have to, and constantly coming back everyday, absorbing ads while you connect with friends. It even knows the posts you draft but never publish. Apparently they managed to poll thousands of Facebook users in something they called a “Feed Quality Panel”.
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Previously, Facebook’s algorithm pushed posts to the top of your News Feed that you were more likely to interact with by either commenting, liking or sharing, and unfortunately, this also included more click-bait type posts.
This algorithmic tuning has allowed Facebook’s feed to stay fresh after almost a decade.
Among the many tweaks that it has made is enabling you to stipulate which friends you deem to be more important – this signal is used to tell Facebook what updates you always want to see at the top. Maybe you’ve seen some of these survey questions at the top of your feed.
And the changes could weed out publishers that rely on clickbait for traffic. Respondents were asked to give stories a rating of up to five stars according to how much they wanted to see each one show up in their news feed.
In a statement posted on its newsroom, two of the platform’s software engineers Cheng Zhang and Si Chen said: “We saw through our research that people reported having a better News Feed experience when the stories they see at the top are stories they are both likely to rate highly if asked and likely to engage with”. Those updates might be pushed down your feed, making you less likely to see them or click on them.
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And those thinking they can just encourage more clicks to get their ranking higher have been warned that his will cause just a “temporary spike” before balance is restored.
