Facebook Shares 4 Ways It’s Improving News Feed Ranking

Facebook is sharing plans on how it plans to give users more of what they want to see in their news feeds.

Upcoming changes to news feed ranking will be focused around four feedback-driven signals.

Over the next few months Facebook users will be asked to provide feedback in different ways

This process of gathering feedback is an expansion of something the company launched in 2019, called the “worth your time” surveys.

The surveys simply asked whether users felt an individual post was worth their time.

If a user replied, “Yes,” then Facebook would aim to rank that content more prominently in their news feed. If they said, “No,” then that type of content would appear toward the bottom.

Facebook is building on those surveys by asking new questions. Here’s more about the different approaches the company is taking to gather feedback.

4 Feedback-Driven Signals

Is This Post Inspirational?

Users want to see more inspiring and uplifting content in their news feeds. Facebook is going to run a series of tests to survey people about which posts they find inspirational.

Facebook will incorporate users’ responses as a signal in news feed ranking, with the goal of showing people more inspirational posts closer to the top of their News Feed.

Is This Post Interesting?

Facebook wants to show users more posts about topic they’re interested in. To accomplish this it will start asking people whether they want to see more or fewer posts about a certain topic.

The feedback will be used to rank content in users’ news feeds, with topics they’re interested in appearing closer to the top.

Do You Want to See Less of These Posts?

Facebook is taking a different approach to learning what kinds of posts users want to see less of. One of the ways it plans to do this is by looking at engagement signals.

For example, if a post generates a lot of angry reactions, then Facebook may append a survey asking users what types of content they don’t enjoy seeing in their news feed.

Do You Want to Hide This Post?

Users have long been able to hide individual posts in their news feed, but it’s not immediately obvious how to do it.

Facebook will start testing a new post design which makes the option to hide posts more prominent.

When users come across a post they don’t want to see again, they tap on the X in the top right corner as shown below.

Existing Ranking Signals Are Still Important

These four new feedback-driven signals will be used in conjunction with the thousands of existing signals Facebook uses to rank posts in users’ news feeds.

Facebook gives a lot of weight to engagement signals when ranking posts, which includes likes, shares, comments, and reactions.

The company says the feedback it’s gathering, in addition to engagement signals, will provide a more complete picture of what users want to see:

“While a post’s engagement — or how often people like it, comment on it, or share it — can be a helpful indicator that it’s interesting to people, this survey-driven approach, which largely occurs outside the immediate reaction to a post, gives a more complete picture of the types of posts people find most valuable and what kind of content detracts from their News Feed experience.”

Source: Facebook Newsroom