Here’s a Great Look at How Facebook Controls Your News Feed.
Facebook’s process for determining what’s in your news feed is frustratingly opaque. However, a recent Slate profile helps explain some of the behind-the-scenes events and is quite informative.
Unsurprisingly, a company uses a variety of factors to determine how different posts rank in your feed. What was a little more surprising, however, is that since the summer of 2014, Facebook has had a group of testers who provide feedback on the news feed. This feedback is also taken into account and accounted for in the magic algorithm. Which, by the way, is actually just a giant pile of dozens of smaller algorithms:
Since coming to power in late 2013, Mosseri’s big initiative has been to create what Facebook calls a “feed quality dashboard.” It began in the summer of 2014 with a group of several hundred people in Knoxville, who were paid by the company to come to the office every day and constantly give detailed feedback on what they saw in their news feeds. (According to Facebook, their whereabouts were “historical coincidence,” resulting from a pilot project in which the company partnered with an unnamed third-party subcontractor.) Mosseri and his team didn’t just study their behavior. They also asked them questions to try to understand why they liked or disliked a particular post, how much they liked it, and what they would rather see instead. “They actually write a small paragraph about each story in their news feed,” notes Greg Marra, product manager for the news feed ranking group. (This is a group that is becoming the Facebook equivalent of the Nielsen families.)
The downside, of course, is that most of this information isn’t all that relevant. We’ve already collected all the most helpful tips for dealing with your news feed here . However, if you’ve ever grabbed your computer monitor and yelled at Facebook, “Why? Why are you showing me this ?! then the Slate article is a good read that might give you some idea.
Who Controls Your Facebook Feed | Slate