FollowIf you are a Facebook user you might have been annoyed more than once to see that continuous flow of news content from people you don’t have any real connection with apart from your Facebook “friendship”. There is good news for you because the company has announced dramatic changes in the way the news feed will be displayed on the user’s page.
Facebook announced the new modifications on Tuesday, the 21st of April 2015. They are going to alter the algorithm that currently determines the posts, photos and clips appear on the wall. Thus, the users will be able to receive information from the friends that they actually follow constantly and not from those that are just somewhere hidden in the friends’ list and they have no relationship with.
Nevertheless, while this new algorithm seems to be tailored to give users a more personalized experience with the social media platform, it is still Facebook that decides who the users’ favorite friends are. This might turn into an issue.
Facebook’s product manager, Max Eulenstein mentions that the company’s main aim is to give users what they want, by showing them the news feed that is relevant to them. This change comes as a result of surveys that they opened for their users. These targeted the format and content of News Feeds, where people can see the threads and comments either from friends or from companies they follow.
Three changes are going to be made and they target different types of users. Firstly, the people who don’t have many Facebook friends will see posts from the same source. Secondly, the users who have a lot of friends will have their best friends’ posts higher up in the content of their wall. Thirdly, friends’ posts will be better ranked in the News Feed than the stories they comment on or like. Relevance is the key to all these changes, according to an analyst with the Technology Business Research.
However, while some experts say that customers are likely to have a better experience on the platform, others disagree, saying that people might not want to see their News Feed change so much after all or that they may be mad to see that Facebook is the one to decide what they should see.
The real reason behind these adjustments might have deeper meanings. Over the years, Facebook has been losing a lot of users. One explanation would be that its utility decreases the more people a user follows. By filtering this, the company hopes to be able to keep more customers.
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