Facebook news feed algorithm to get a massive overhaul yet again

Facebook is once again bringing significant changes to its news feed algorithm. Facebook product managers Ramya Sethuraman and Jordi Vallmitjana and Technical Program Manager Jon Levin detailed out the company's plan to make the news feed more personal in their recent blog post.

Facebook admits that "the goal of News Feed is to connect people with the posts they find most relevant." And now that Facebook is talking about "quality" over "quantity" in terms of time spent by users, Facebook said they are making the news feed more personal based on users' feedback.

"Today, 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."

A few weeks ago, a study showed that political posts draw more angry reactions on Facebook, based on the data generated in the first quarter this year. It also showed videos have a higher engagement rate than other post formats like texts, links and pictures posted on Facebook.

Now that Facebook also wants to prioritise links you might consider most worthwhile, we can expect Facebook to fix some of the existing issues of the news feed for the greater good. Now, Facebook also wants to show you more posts from your close friends.

READ | Political posts draw more angry reactions on Facebook: Study

"We’ve historically predicted who people might want to hear from based on 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."

In addition to these observations, Facebook says that it has begun surveying people on Facebook to ask them to list their close friends, much like 'close friends' list for Instagram stories. Well, it might Facebook pages to some extent.

However, Facebook hints news feed will not be limited to posts from only certain people. Facebook said that it is only going to rank posts from your closest friends much higher in the news feed.

"These changes aren’t meant to show more or less from Pages or friends. Rather, the Page links that are surfaced to people will be ones they find worth their time — and the friend posts will be from friends people want to hear from most."

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