Facebook, keeps trying to improve its user experience. In an effort to reach a new standard of transparency, the top social media network is publishing a formal "News Feed Values" document detailing algorithms deciding what shows up on users' feeds.
According to Tech Crunch, the giant social media network has announced on a blog post that they are currently building a better news feed for users. According to its core values the feed should inform and entertain.
The blog post also states that Facebook is a platform for all ideas, where authentic communication beats spam. Users have the controls to hide or highlight what they want.
Facebook also announced on another blog post a feed ranking change that implements in practice its primary value that "friends and family come first." Post from friends will be shown in the News Feed higher up than posts from Pages like news outlets. That means pages could expect a decline in referral traffic and reach.
Facebook's News Feed uses a computer algorithm for ranking. However, Facebook's Adam Mosseri explains that because Facebook News Feeds are designed by people, the people's values are reflected in how they make their decisions. He added that users can trust the fact that, when deciding the best content to show, Facebook doesn't have ulterior motives.
When building users' News Feed each day, Facebook could never show everything and has to choose from between thousands of potential stories. The competition for space for any particular piece of content leads to an inevitable decrease in reach.
There were allegations that Facebook purposefully is pushing Pages to pay for ads in order to get seen or that it picks stories that will earn it money. However, in reality the main goal of the social media network is to create a feed that keeps people satisfied both quantitatively and qualitatively.
According to Tech Times, users will be seeing posts from friends and family more frequently than they would from institutions, commercial brands and publishers. This may be good news for users who primarily connect with real-life contacts, but bad news for the publishing world. Certain publishers might be put at a disadvantage by showing fewer posts from FB Pages after Facebook implements the new ranking system.
