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Friday, November 7, 2014

Facebook Makes Its News Feed a Little Less Frustrating

Facebook’s news feed, the main screen that shows you what your friends are doing, is the heart of the service. Yet the mysteries of why things do and don’t show up in each person’s news feed have confounded users of the social network ever since the feature was introduced in 2006.
Why does Facebook show me every single post from people I barely know and but doesn’t show me the gems from a favorite cousin? Why do I constantly see ads for products I would never buy and yet never see the free coffee promo from my favorite cafe? Why did Facebook do such a lousy job showing me election news this week, even though I have scores of journalist friends and follow a dozen news sites that were posting stories about the results?
Facebook has embarked on a campaign to give its users more answers to those questions — and more control over what they see in their individual news feeds. “If we’re showing you something you’re not interested in, we’re not doing our job the way we should be doing it,” Adam Mosseri, who began overseeing the team developing the news feed in August, said in an interview.
On Friday, the company took a modest step toward giving users more control, introducing new tools that let them more easily tell Facebook what they don’t want to see.
When an item pops up that doesn’t interest you, you can click on the nearly invisible gray arrow at the top right corner of the item and tell Facebook you don’t want to see that item.
You will then have the option to give Facebook more guidance, explaining that you want to see fewer stories from the person posting the item or that you want to unfollow that person (which means you won’t see any more of his posts in your news feed but can still see his activities by visiting his Facebook page).
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Facebook’s “news feed settings” highlight who you’ve recently unfollowed, allowing you to delete or add back people and pages based on how interested you now are in their posts.Credit
The company is also adding a control called “news feed settings” that will show you whose posts you have seen most frequently in the last week and who you’ve recently unfollowed, allowing you to delete or add back people and pages based on how interested you now are in their posts. The new controls are immediately available on the desktop and mobile web versions of Facebook and will be added to the smartphone apps in the next few weeks.
If it still sounds complicated, it is. Mr. Mosseri said Facebook is trying to figure out the right balance between giving power users — for example, software engineers — a fine level of control over their feeds and giving more casual users simple ways to make their feed more responsive without having to delve into the gory details.
Ultimately, Facebook wants people to spend more time on the service, which exposes them to more ads, the source of most of the company’s revenue. In a town hall discussion with users on Thursday, Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s chief executive, said, “With news feed, our goal is to build the perfect, personalized newspaper for everyone in the world.”
That perfection is a long way off, but Facebook has made improving the news feed a top priority. “We have to figure out how to simplify this,” Mr. Mosseri said.
Some ideas for improvement are easy. That arrow to get to the news feed controls from each post? “It can’t have this light gray chevron that no one can see,” he said. Expect that to change soon.
Other issues are more complicated. The news feed algorithm takes into account hundreds of factors, such as whether you click on a lot of videos or ignore news articles, when deciding what to show you. Could Facebook ever figure out a way to condense that into a one-sentence explanation about why you are seeing a specific item? Maybe not.
What about directly asking users what they want? The advertising side of Facebook is already trying that by encouraging users to specify their ad preferences to help make the ads they see more relevant (which, yes, helps Facebook make more money from those ads).
“Maybe we need to have more personalized models,” Mr. Mosseri said. “Maybe we need to ask people what topics they’re interested in.”

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