Facebook as a social network has tremendous value today because of their elusive News Feed which is constructed by a complex algorithm based on the pages you like, your communications with friends and family, what pages you interact with and so on. Now Facebook has surprisingly provided some details about its "core values" for the first time. The social network claims that they use these rules over the long term to re-arrange and show feed content to the end user.
The main idea behind the news feed, according to Facebook, is as follows:
FRIENDS AND FAMILY COME FIRST
Facebook was built on the idea of connecting people with their friends and family. That is still the driving principle of News Feed today. Our top priority is keeping you connected to the people, places and things you want to be connected to — starting with the people you are friends with on Facebook. That’s why if it’s from your friends, it’s in your feed, period — you just have to scroll down. To help make sure you don’t miss the friends and family posts you are likely to care about, we put those posts toward the top of your News Feed. We learn from you and adapt over time. For example, if you tend to like photos from your sister, we’ll start putting her posts closer to the top of your feed so you won’t miss what she posted while you were away.Our research has also shown us that, after friends and family, people have two other strong expectations when they come to News Feed:
Your feed should inform. People expect the stories in their feed to be meaningful to them — and we have learned over time that people value stories that they consider informative. Something that one person finds informative or interesting may be different from what another person finds informative or interesting — this could be a post about a current event, a story about your favorite celebrity, a piece of local news, or a recipe. We’re always working to better understand what is interesting and informative to you personally, so those stories appear higher up in your feed.
Your feed should entertain. We’ve also found that people enjoy their feeds as a source of entertainment. For some people, that’s following a celebrity or athlete; for others it’s watching Live videos and sharing funny photos with their friends. We work hard to try to understand and predict what posts on Facebook you find entertaining to make sure you don’t miss out on those.
Based on these factors, Facebook says it will hide content that is considered "misleading, sensational and spammy" in the user feed. If some day this content detection algorithm goes wrong, you may miss some interesting information from a friend or a page you are following on Facebook.
According to Facebook, the user can control which content he wants to see. By using actions like "unfollow", "hide", "see first", "show more of this type" etc available for people and pages, you can choose your content of interest so it appears or disappears from your News Feed.
With the latest changes, Facebook is going to show posts from friends and family with a higher priority in your feed. This means that publishers who rely on Facebook pages to convey information to content consumers can easily lose their coverage of the audience.
However, for those publishers who pay Facebook to make sure their content reaches a wider audience, this update will not be applied. This contradicts with the "friends and family" rule, which can lead to the following:
- You will see paid posts in your news feed.
- Then you will see status updates from your friend.
- Finally, you might not see any interesting content created by a page or a person, because it was not promoted by paying money to Facebook!
It is understandable that Facebook wants to earn with promoted content. However, you should consciously make sure that you have tuned your Facebook settings and Likes properly to see content of your interest. I will explain this will an example.
Suppose you find Winaero's content interesting and useful. To continue seeing updates from Winaero in your Facebook feed, you need to visit our page once on Facebook and enable "See First" option. You can also turn on notifications.
- Open our Facebook page: Winaero on Facebook.
- Hover with your mouse over the "Liked" button" or tap the button with your finger (if you have a touchscreen) to show this menu:
- Tick the option "See First" under "In your news feed". You can also set Notifications to "All On" as shown below.
Repeat this for all pages that you find useful and interesting.
What do you think about this change in Facebook? Tell us in the comments.
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the kind of manipulation with people’s minds is what old socialists warned us kids when they bashed delusional capitalists…
RIP privacy
Excuse me if I’m speaking about another feature, but [censored] facebook and [censored] the news feed. There is a huge issue with users stealing content from creators on youtube and either cutting out the desired portion, cutting out any scene with the original content creator pictured, or in some cases directly ripping off the whole video in its entirety. This stolen ‘or counterfeit’ video is then uploaded to a facebook account under the thieves [assumingly] phony / temporary account as well as linked to their bank accounts to reap in the benefits of injected advertisements. This can be quite lucrative under the right circumstances and by the time the original creator is notified of the theft and illegal resubmission to the facebook video platform most of the money has been made by the million(s) views already collected. I think it has something to do with the demographics in that when I think of facebook I see 8 to maybe ~60 years in the average account and youtube being that of a younger audience and while you do have users of all ages on youtube it seems that the adult audience is nowhere near that of facebook when it comes to average daily users. This or whatever the actual cause is allows millions of views to rack up in the span of 2-3 days. Also, when the creator does put in a DMCA takedown notice in, which can be anywhere from moments after the stolen video was uploaded (usually brought forth by a subscriber or fan of the original YT creator) to hours and days after, it doesn’t seem to do any good. A DMCA can be put in 1 hour after uploading counterfeit video to facebook video platform and developer doesn’t get any response from facebook until after a few days to a week (in some rare cases) after first submission of takedown notice. Facebook has their hands dirty in that cutting the advertiser ties to a video to desist pirate’s monetary incentive or financial gain doesn’t just hurt the pirate. Facebook gets more commission per video per ad then the ‘supposed content creator’ who stole the video in the first place. If you are anywhere near the news then you know this video advertiser platform has been very lucrative to facebook simply because of the ingenuity and complex nature of the ever so well performing algorithm.
Sad day for content creators. Facebook doesn’t give a [censored]. That speil about the family drive of facebook is [censored]ing bullshit [censored] sauce with [censored] in it.
Anyway, there’s my $4.20 cents in