Facebook tweaks News Feed to show more informative stories to users

Facebook's News Feed is an interesting beast, and it's been receiving a lot of tweaking recently. From offering up personally relevant advertisements to limiting the number of clickbait articles that make it through, the News Feed has been changing quite a bit this summer. Facebook isn't done with its adjustments, today announcing a new update that will hopefully show more relevant and informative stories to its users.

Facebook is approaching the task of showing more personally informative News Feed stories from two angles. The first involves the mounds of feedback it received from its Feed Quality Program surveys, which asks thousands of users each day to rate each story on their feed on a scale from one to five – one means that the story was "really not informative," while a rating of five means it was "really informative."

Using these ratings and the information provided by people who chose to answer more detailed questions about their ratings, Facebook discovered that users considered a post informative if it was relevant to their interests (which seems like a given), prompted a broader discussion, or involved news about their world – not necessarily the world at large, but their local communities or issues that concern them specifically.

With that information in hand, which Facebook calls a "signal," the company can then implement the second step to showing each individual user personally informative stories. By looking at what you click, comment, and share the most, Facebook can further refine the process down to stories that you specifically should find informative.

Essentially all Facebook is doing here is taking news that a general audience has labeled informative in some fashion and narrowing it down so that it fits what each individual user finds engaging. That may not seem like much, but an update like this could potentially change the kind of articles that folks see on their News Feed for the better. At least, that's what Facebook hopes. After all, the stuff being shared on your News Feed isn't really worth anything if it isn't getting you use Facebook more.

SOURCE: Facebook Newsroom