As part of Facebook’s “Feed Quality Program”, the social giant today updated its Timeline to make its user experience even better than it previously was. Now articles that you are likely to spend more time reading will appear at the top of your Timeline.
The social giant announced today that it’s changing the way its feeds algorithm works. Facebook says, that it is ‘learning’ that the time people choose to spend reading or watching content they clicked on from News Feed is an important signal that the story was interesting to them. Thus the company is adding another factor to News Feed ranking so that it will now predict how long you spend looking at an article in the Facebook mobile browser or an Instant Article after you have clicked through from News Feed.
This update to ranking will take into account how likely you are to click on an article and then spend time reading it. The company will not be counting loading time towards this — we will be taking into account time spent reading and watching once the content has fully loaded. Facebook’s newest algorithm will also be looking at the time spent within a threshold so as not to accidentally treat longer articles preferentially.
According to Facebook, actions people take on Facebook– liking, clicking, commenting or sharing a post, don’t always indicate what is important to them. It’s more logical to know on what people spend most of their time on.
Facebook is now doing just that. It will rank content on your Timeline according to what you like and what you spend the most time reading. This also helps the company continue to fight clickbait and provides high quality content to its users.
With this change, we can better understand which articles might be interesting to you based on how long you and others read them, so you’ll be more likely to see stories you’re interested in reading. This change only factors in the time people spend reading an article regardless of whether that time is spent reading an Instant Article or an article in the mobile web browser,
the announcement reads.
Another significant change the company is bringing to the Timeline is that it is promoting a diversity of Pages in your News Feed. This means that the links on your Timeline will be distributed well and posts from one particular Page will not be repeated. This allows you to discover more and use the web services more effectively.
With this change, we can better understand which articles might be interesting to you based on how long you and others read them, so you’ll be more likely to see stories you’re interested in reading.
a Facebook spokesperson said.
Just like most features from the website, these new updates will also roll out for different platforms over different markets slowly over the next few weeks.
