Facebook is very good at displaying content you may not be as interested in. Also, sometimes you may feel like you are missing certain posts or people in your feed. That will change as of now, as the company makes significant changes to the feed. You get more control over it.
So reports Meta, Facebook’s parent company, in a recently published blog post. The changes to the feed should make it relevant to its users again. From now on, you can indicate for each post whether you want to see more or less of it, and the algorithm will then do the rest.
Facebook feed to be overhauled
Facebook uses a sort of ranking system to do this. When you want to see more of something, the feed temporarily increases the supply of similar content. And if you press that other button, that logically causes you to see less of such content within the feed for the time being.
The new feed (Image: Meta)
“By implementing new ways of feedback into the feed, we are ensuring that our artificial intelligence becomes smarter and more responsive,” the company said. Initially, Facebook users will get to see the buttons a little more often so they can get used to the new features and buttons.
New buttons in the feed
So the buttons are presented very clearly at first. But over time, they disappear in the menu (those three dots), so you have to perform an extra action to bring them out. Furthermore, you can specify whether you want to see more messages from friends and family or rather groups and pages from now on.
Meta is making these changes for a reason, of course. Not only is Instagram under fire for constantly recommending “relevant content,” the number of Facebook users is decreasing. So the company needs to take big steps to remain relevant – especially in the eyes of young people.
