Another week, another News Feed change.

Facebook announced a new change to the algorithim that powers its News Feed. This time, the change is meant to make the stories you see "more personally informative."

The idea, Facebook says, is to create a new ranking system — personalized to each user — that is able to predict what will be the most informative to you based on your interests and habits. Those stories will then be given higher placement in your News Feed.

The company uses a few different signals to determine what qualifies as "personally informative" for each user. First, it takes feedback from its News Feed quality surveys, where users rank posts based on how informative they are. "Generally, we’ve found people find stories informative if they are related to their interests, if they engage people in broader discussions and if they contain news about the world around them," the company writes in a blog post outlining the change.

Those that are rated as more informative are then used as model for Facebook's prediction algorithms.

"We then combine this signal with how relevant the story might be to you personally — taking into account things like your relationship with the person or publisher that posted, or what you choose to click on, comment on or share — to best predict stories that you might personally find informative," the post continues.

Facebook notes that that what qualifies as "personally informative" is likely to change over time and the company will likely continue tweaking its methods, too.

The update comes just one week after the social network announced its last big News Feed update. That change, however, was aimed at reducing the amount of clickbait users see in their feeds. 

As usual, the company says it doesn't expect the latest update to be a source "significant changes" to publishers, though it notes some might see small increases or decreases in referral traffic.

Source:
courtesy of MASHABLE

by KARISSA BELL

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