Facebook Says Publishers Shouldn’t Fret About News Feed Changes.
This week, Facebook announced that it was changing the way it ranked content in its all-important News Feed — the main page Facebook users see on their desktop and on their phones — in order to promote “high-quality content.” And Facebook said it would make things like “meme photos” harder to see.
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But if that’s the case, then who is Facebook trying to punish? And why does Facebook care about this, anyway — isn’t the crucial thing that people like the stuff, and not what the stuff is?
Your post says that you want promote some kinds of content and demote other kinds of content. But I don’t really understand what you want to push up and down, and why.
Lars Backstrom: We don’t really think about it that much in terms of promoting and demoting certain kinds of content. The way we think about it is that we’re doing a better job of identifying value.
In the past, there were a lot of things that all fell into one bucket, and we would treat them all the same, even though they clearly weren’t. If you see a funny meme photo in your feed — sure, you get some value from that. But if you compare that to reading 1,000 words on AllThingsD, you would presumably get more value from that experience than the first one. And, in the past, we were treating them as the same.
But if I like them both, aren’t they the same? From a Facebook perspective, shouldn’t the things that people like be the things that people like?
I’m not saying that one doesn’t have value. And we’re not trying to impose our will and view on the world. But we went and asked people which of those things they get more value from. We’ve run surveys, and asked people to rate stories and things.
And they’ll say, “The cat photo was great, and I had a good chuckle, but of those two, the second one enriched my life more, and I got more value out of it.”
It’s not us trying to be more proscriptive. We’re trying align our definition of value with that of our users.
Are you paying attention to the source of the content? Or is it solely the type of the content?
Right now, it’s mostly oriented around the source. As we refine our approaches, we’ll start distinguishing more and more between different types of content. But, for right now, when we think about how we identify “high quality,” it’s mostly at the source level.
So something that comes from publisher X, you might consider high-quality, and if it comes from publisher Y, it’s low-quality?
Yes.
http://allthingsd.com/20131206/like-this-if-you-like-pandas-facebook-says-publishers-shouldnt-fret-about-news-feed-changes/
One can imagine the activists posts will be considered low quality
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