The most common complaint Facebook users have been voicing for years is the platform’s messy primary feed, which has long abandoned the more traditional chronological format. Instead, it prioritises on showing popular posts from friends, most recent updates from business, suggestions promoting certain pages or creators, and of course, advertisements. Apparently, the platform’s parent company is finally going to fix this, Engadget reports.
According to the publication, Meta will be updating the primary Facebook Feed to allow users to see fewer or more posts from friends, groups and pages. Unlike the existing Favourites setting under Feed Preferences which lets you manually prioritise which person or pages to appear on your feed, this newer version lets you determine the frequency based on the aforementioned categories. The company adds that this approach will allow it to incorporate user feedback into Feed rankings, which will help improve Facebook’s machine learning system in order to be “smarter and more responsive.”
The new menu will appear in the Feed Preferences page under Settings tab in Facebook. In the page, these will be categorised as Posts, while older options such as Favourites, Snooze, Unfollow, etc are sorted under the Connections category. In terms of feed frequency customisation for friends, groups and pages, users can choose between three options: Normal, Show More, or Show Less.
In addition, Facebook will also provide users the ability to manually set the frequency of posts by friends, groups, and pages directly via the primary feed by accessing the three-dot menu on each post. Doing so will not only update your feed content, but helps improve Facebook’s AI system for Feed rankings as well.
However, the frequency of advertisements appearing in between posts will be unaffected by this new change, which is expected. But hey, at least there are some improvements being made to the primary feed. That being said, Meta did not say when the updated Feed Preferences is expected to be rolled out to all Facebook users.
(Source: Engadget)
