Facebook product managers Ramya Sethuraman and Jordi Vallmitjana and technical program manager Jonathan Levin announced several changes being made to the News Feed. The team pointed out that the goal of News Feed is to connect people with the posts they find most relevant as it’s not about the amount of time someone spends on Facebook, but rather the quality of time spent.
This means ensuring people seeing what they want to see such as posts from family and friends or news articles and videos from Pages they follow. In a set of surveys last year, the team asked users what posts they thought were worth their time in order to make changes to the News Feed.
“To do this, we try to understand what people are already doing on Facebook — what they like, comment on and share. We also use surveys to get more context about the posts people want to see and who they want to see them from,” said the team. “We are announcing two ranking updates based on surveys we’ve conducted: one prioritizes the friends someone might want to hear from most and the other prioritizes the links a person might consider most worthwhile.”
To better connect you with the people you care about, Facebook is asking users to list the friends that they are closest to and they are looking at the patterns that emerge from the results, some of which include being tagged in the same photos and continuously reacting/commenting on the same posts and checking-in at the same places. Facebook will do this in addition to other signals like how often they interact with a given friend, how many mutual friends they have, and whether they mark someone as a close friend.
This does not mean that the News Feed is going to be limited to posts from only certain people and it does not mean you will necessarily see more friend content. But you will likely see posts from those you have close relationships with higher up in your News Feed.
Facebook also knows that there are some users you want to hear from right now, but it may not be who you want to hear from one year from now or even in a few months. So the prediction models are continuously updated based on the interactions people have with their friends on Facebook. Facebook is going to continue surveying people to make sure they understand how new actions and interests map to the friends they want to hear from most.
Last month, Facebook explained that it was surveying users in order to show them relevant posts and determine which ones would be worth their time. Based on the surveys, the News Feed has been updated to show people links that they predict will be worthwhile. These responses are used for identifying signs that someone might find a link worth their time. This is combined with factors of information that Facebook has about the post such as the type of post, who it is from, and the engagement received.
