Facebook Plans To Create User-Customized Feeds
JAKARTA - Facebook makes it easy for you to control who and what appears in your feed. The company has long been showing users its news feed algorithm, giving users whatever Facebook defined as "top" news at the time.
Users can also choose to show only the most recent posts from their friends, family, groups, or pages. Facebook also gives users the ability to see more or less of a specific person, page, or group right inside a standard post.
This will instantly change the algorithm that Facebook presents you with but never give users a way to see how it affects the feed. You never feel in control of your feed. Show less, yes, but it's never clear how much, for example.
Well, Facebook will now give users more control over what appears in the feed. According to a press release by Facebook, the company states, "testing new ways to make it easier to find and use News Feed controls to adjust people's rating preferences and customize their News Feed."
Users can now increase or decrease the amount of content they view from certain friends, family, groups, or pages. Users can also customize how much of a particular topic they see in their feed. Facebook says that it will roll out these changes in the coming weeks to a small fraction of users worldwide.
Hopefully, this will let users really fine-tune what they see and what they don't see in their feed. Instead of an arbitrary algorithm where you have to keep saying "I want to see less of this," then you can actually dig in and tell the specifics how little or how much more you want to see from the person, page, or group. this.
Being able to control certain topics is also a plus. Instead of customizing a page or group, you can press an existing topic.
Facebook giving users this option proves that the algorithm doesn't solve everything. No two people are the same. Likewise, two people who share a common interest in one area do not necessarily mean they agree on the same thing.
Being able to say, "I want to see less of this person" without having to actually block or unfriend them would be a welcome change for users, then it should happen across all social media platforms.
Just because a friend posts live about a sporting event a few days you don't care about at all doesn't mean you don't want to be his friend. With Facebook's new controls, you can now say, "I'd like to see less of this topic."