Another News Feed algorithm update hit Facebook on Monday, this time with the hope of presenting “high quality content” to users.
Varun Kacholia, an engineering manager, and Minwen Ji, a software engineer, wrote on the company’s blog Monday that users will start to see links to articles more often, especially on mobile. The change means that meme photos will start appearing less prominently, while news articles will get bumped up within the News Feed.
“Why are we doing this? Our surveys show that on average people prefer links to high quality articles about current events, their favorite sports team or shared interests, to the latest meme. Starting soon, we’ll be doing a better job of distinguishing between a high quality article on a website versus a meme photo hosted somewhere other than Facebook when people click on those stories on mobile.”
Kacholia and Ji went on to write that users may soon see three related articles appear beneath stories they click in their News Feed “to help you discover more content you may find interesting.” This feature has been quietly rolling out to select users for several weeks. It’s important to note that Facebook is putting more emphasis on what they consider to be high quality content. Which begs the question: Do some news sources automatically have more authority than others?
Buzzfeed (a site that has seen an 855 percent increase in referral traffic from Facebook) writes, “More broadly, it’s an attempt by Facebook to increase content quality across the board while re-asserting its dominance over those who have, to some extent, figured out how to ‘game’ News Feed.”
Justin Osofsky, Facebook’s VP of Media Partnerships and Global Operations, hinted at the update in October, writing on the blog, “Over the past few months, we’ve worked particularly closely with news and publishing sites to understand how we can help drive more readers to their sites.”
On average, referral traffic from Facebook to media sites has increased by more than 170 percent throughout the past year, he wrote.
Commenting stories revamped.
In an effort to create more conversations on each post, bumping has also been updated to emphasize friends’ stories that have new comments. This will push some stories back into users’ feeds with the new comments highlighted. Kacholia and Ji explain that, “Our testing has shown that doing this in moderation for just a small number of stories can lead to more conversations between people and their friends on all types of content.”
More updates on the horizon?
Last week, All Things D revealed recently surfaced mobile screenshots of even further emphasis on news articles. “The company is testing a feature that would allow users to save links shared inside Facebook to a list for later reading…The functionality is quite similar to the popular apps Pocket and Instapaper,” the site wrote.
According to tech blog MyTechSkool, the new feature would appear as a small bookmark button in the toolbar. When users clicked the iBook-like button, the link would be “saved” inside the user’s Facebook apps menu.
The Wall Street Journal also reported that the social media giant has been quietly working on a service, internally called Reader, with the goal of becoming “a newspaper for mobile devices.”
These News Feed updates could prove to be right on target, as an October Pew Research Center study revealed that 78 percent of Facebook users consume news while on the site for other reasons, and 30 percent of all U.S. adults get their news on Facebook.