Users Tell Facebook How Their News Feeds Be Tweaked

In its bid to improve user experience, Facebook is making big changes to its News Feed. It is tuning its feed while asking users what they want to see on top of their feeds.

ABC News reports that Facebook has been asking scores of people whether they want to see a certain story in their story and how much. User ratings are provided on a scale of one to five stars. The exercise was conceived when research on user insights suggested that users like to see stories on the top which they rate high and are likely to engage with.

"We are making an update to News Feed that combines these two signals. News Feed will begin to look at both the probability that you would want to see the story at the top of your feed and the probability that you will like, comment on, click or share a story," a Facebook blog post read on Monday.

The News Feed algorithm is also self-correcting, the post explains. Though referral traffic to most pages would remain unaffected, Facebook's engineers said pages which push users to take action, like click, may see a drop if they are rated poorly by users.

According to Tech Crunch, the optimized News Feed over time could make glance-worthy content from users' feeds visible to others even if they do not engage. The report also claims that Facebook's News Feed algorithm is a differentiator at a time when social media platforms like Twitter are bogged by marketing and spammers.