Facebook plans to bring more changes to its algorithm to fetch more content from friends in the News Feed of a user. The change, which will be rolled out by the social network in the coming week, will have more updates from friends displayed prominently in the News Feed.
Facebook aims to show interesting stuff in News Feed
News Feeds have been witnessing changes for quite some time, and each tweak in algorithm determines what a user sees or does not see in the News Feed. Explaining the reason for such an update, the social network said in a blog post, “We’ve also learned that people are worried about missing important updates from the friends they care about.”
The tweak will make sure that status updates from friends and any other activity concerned with them is takes priority in the News Feed while other content such as Pages liked or news content takes a backseat. Also Facebook will be hiding likes and the comments made by friends on News Feed posts. Posts from the same source will be shown back to back by Facebook after the tweak to the News Feed.
Update may not be liked by a few
Facebook’s News Feed had become heavily loaded with content other than that from friends, so the move will be welcomed by users. The majority of feed generated by the algorithm is comprised of content in which users are not very interested. While they hoped that the News Feed would serve them with updates from friends, it consisted more of uninteresting stuff such as articles from news outlets, promotions from brands or the likes and comments received by random posts that were liked by the friends.
However, it is expected that not everyone associated with Facebook is going to appreciate this move. The social network itself has warned that this move might cause some serious issues such as blocking traffic to publishers and other Facebook pages. In a blog post, Facebook said that on a few occasions, “post reach and referral traffic could potentially decline.”
