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| Facebook has tweaked its News Feed algorithm to try and punish hoax new stories |
FACEBOOK is on the verge of drastically altering your News Feed. Again.
Facebook is tweaking its News Feed algorithm yet again.
The news comes months after the US social network firm announced plans to measure how long you spend reading posts, statuses, comments or browsing a friends' photos.
If you linger on a particular person's status, or read through the comments under a certain kind of video – Facebook will populate your timeline with similar content.
And now the Californian company is making adjustments to make it easier for social network users to ignore certain types of posts.
Facebook has made the changes based on data collected via a series of surveys which asked users to pick between two viral stories.
The change to the News Feed was announced on the official Facebook company blog by Software Engineer Sami Tas and Data Scientist Ta Virot Chiraphadhanakul.
"The actions people take on Facebook—liking, clicking, commenting or sharing a post—are some of the main factors we consider to determine what to show at the top of your News Feed," the post reads.
"We’ve learned that honing in on how to value these signals helps make sure we show you the most relevant content.
"As part of our ongoing effort to improve News Feed, we ask thousands of people every day to rate their experience and tell us how we can improve what they see when they check Facebook.
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| One the surveys Facebook rolled out to gather data for its News Feed algorithm tweak |
"People also take story surveys where they see two stories that could be in their News Feed and answer which they’d most want to see.
"We compare their answer to the order we would have put these stories in their News Feed. If the story picked is the one News Feed would have shown higher up, that’s a good sign that things are working well.
"If the story picked is the one we would have put lower down, this highlights an area for improvement.
"With this update, if a significant amount of people tell us they would prefer to see other posts more than that particular viral post, we’ll take that into account when ranking, so that viral post might show up lower in people’s feeds in the future, since it might not actually be interesting to people."
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| Facebook is always changing and tweaking how news curation works on the social network |
Facebook believes the change will affect news stories about hoaxes, which usually receive a huge number of shares and comments, compared to other news stories.
Stories rated unfavourably by those surveyed by Facebook will automatically be pushed down your News Feed – even if they have a much higher number of shares and comments than other stories or user-generated posts.
But for those who do not want to leave their news curation in the hands of Facebook's algorithms, the US firm recently pushed out an update to its iOS app which returns some control over the News Feed.
“We know that ultimately you’re the only one who truly knows what is most meaningful to you,” Facebook Product Manager Jacob Frantz admitted in a company blog post.
“That is why we want to give you more ways to control what you see. Today we are announcing even better tools for you to actively shape and improve the experience.
“We’ve redesigned and expanded Facebook’s News Feed Preferences to give you more control.”
The biggest change is the ability to quickly choose pages and friends that will always appears at the top of your News Feed – so you never miss an update.
Facebook has also added a new setting to make unfollowing friends faster.
The unfollow feature allows you to stay friends with someone, without ever having to see their latest photos, status updates or Candy Crush posts.
cool...they should also come up with something that would allow us approve random people tagging us on their post or pictures, so dat our timeline doesnt look messed up, nd full of things that are'nt even us.
ReplyDelete=)) True!
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