To Fight Clickbait, Facebook's Feed Prioritizes What Surveys Say

It will change which posts you see first in your feed, and weed out the posts Facebook thinks you'd rather not look at.

"Pages might see some declines in referral traffic if the rate at which their stories are clicked on does not match how much people report wanting to see those stories near the top of their News Feed", the post said.

The changes to the Facebook News Feed are created to show your more content that you may actually want to see. Facebook said that "in general, this update should not impact reach or referral traffic meaningfully for the majority of Pages", but does caution that some may see some effects in traffic.

Based on its research, Facebook learned that a better experience was had when stories shown at the top of the feed are ones they are "both likely to rate highly if asked and likely to engage with".

We are making an update to News Feed that combines these two signals. Thanks to data from new surveys in which users are able to give stories a star ranking of one to five, the News Feed will soon base order on something else - what they want to see. Facebook's algorithm will include probabilities users want to see a given story and the likelihood of engagement. Though no one likes Clickbait, which offers headlines with just enough info to get users to click, it does unbelievably well online. In the meantime, the algorithm ensures that irrespective of what number of mates you add, the feed stays related.

Instead of click-bait, the social media giant encourages you "post things that your audience finds meaningful". Facebook is advising page owners to "avoid encouraging people to take an action" because it might throw off the News Feed algorithm and cause a negative tip in the scales when the feed rebalances itself.

Twitter recently rolled out a user-facing feature that's only small but grants some relief to observers who fear Twitter has been slowly losing focus.