Facebook is changing its News Feed yet again, and this time it’s looking to make it more informative.
The social network is adding a new “ranking signal” that will help surface the most informative stories that would’ve already appeared in your Feed, just not in as prominent a view.
Here’s how the algorithm works: Members of the company’s Feed Quality Program rank stories on a scale of one to five, one being “really not informative” and five being “really informative.” Participants who rank a story highly are also asked to explain why they enjoyed seeing that particular story.
This data is then used to create a ranking signal, which is just one of the many signals used by Facebook to determine how relevant something is to you, based on your interests and habits.
The results are, hopefully, posts that you find personally informative. This will likely change over time, Facebook notes in a blog post, and means you’ll see content in your News Feed that won’t necessarily show up in the Feeds of people of you know.
Human touch
The Feed Quality Program is particularly intriguing for those who’ve never heard about it before. It basically consists of “tens of thousands” of surveys crowd-sourced daily as well as more involved participants who are paid for their efforts.
Together, they’ll determine what makes a story informative, though Facebook will rely on things like your own interests, relation to the whomever posted the story and what content you typically engage with to ultimately surface stories you see.
The new ranking signal comes just a week after Facebook tweaked its News Feed to bury clickbait articles. Facebook updates its News Feed algorithm often, so this won’t be the last time you hear about changes coming to what you see on the most popular social network on the planet.
Source: techradar.com
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