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Facebook is Cleaning up Your News Feed

Facebookfacebook took to their blog today with an update about the news feed. They’re changing the sorting algorithms again, but this time around I don’t think too many people will mind.

Unlike past changes which were designed to thin out the content you saw in order to get pages to pay to get your attention, today’s updates are reportedly designed to filter out spammy, frequently circulated, and like-bait posts.

Pages and Facebook users that post spammy content are now going to be de-emphasized. Facebook says that by "measuring how frequently people on Facebook who visit a link choose to like the original post or share that post with their friends, we’ve been able to better detect spammy links." This includes unwanted content like stories that claim to link to a photo album but instead take the viewer to a website with just ads.

The new algorithm is also going to limit the number of times you see the same funny video or cute photo. They say that they are are improving News Feed to de-emphasize the Pages which post the content, which does not strike me as the right solution. I think it would be better to filter the content, not de-emphasize the source.

And finally, Facebook is also going to do more to filter out like-baiting. Like-baiting is when a post explicitly asks News Feed readers to like, comment or share the post in order to get additional distribution beyond what the post would normally receive.

Like this, for example:

like-baiting-screenshot[1]

The new algorithm is designed to better detect these stories and  make sure that they are not shown more prominently in News Feed than more relevant stories from friends and other Pages.

 

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