Facebook’s news feed is the most important part of one of the key
sites on the internet. Almost everyone who has ever owned a computer is
able to at least recognise it (particularly as so many other websites
have emulated it
in so many ways), and most of these people regularly access their own
walls and news feeds via their personal Facebook accounts. It's the private little plot of land in which only content people actually care about filters through to them.
At least, that’s how our news feeds work in theory.
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| source: likefruit.pl |
But the company seems to have spent the last few years tarnishing them.
Hyperbole? Perhaps, but it cannot be argued that some of the recent
Facebook updates have transformed people's precious, personal spaces
into little more than spam. Nowadays, we can't go two scrolls of a mouse
wheel without coming across an inexplicably viral photograph or an auto-playing video of the latest Vine celebrity sneezing - or whatever it is they do that people actually find entertaining.
Our feeds have become yet another spam-hole, and instead of
seeing pictures of our smiling, happy family members, we're becoming
inundated with whatever Facebook and its army of sponsors want us to see.
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| source: mehditihani.com |
But, amidst even more reports of various Facebook updates with questionable morals, good news is beginning to filter through. Following the announcement that the company has begun officially supporting the Tor Web Browser in an effort to help those in countries with regulated internet, Facebook have now released a small update to their news feeds which will have positive effects a little closer to home.
Yesterday, they gave some power back.
While we have always been able to block a page or person from
appearing on our feeds, we will now be given more control. The change
occurs after we remove an individual post from our home page. After
choosing to unfollow, we will be asked whether we would prefer to never see posts from this individual/company again or whether we'd rather just see fewer of their posts.
This information is then stored, and users can look back on whose posts
they have completely blocked and who they have merely chosen to see
less of. It is even possible to alter whose posts are most likely to
appear on your news feed.
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| source: buzzfeed.com |
In an interview with Buzzfeed,
Facebook product manager Greg Marra said, "We’ve been thinking a lot
about how we can better get at the qualitative aspects about what you
love about your News Feed. That’s fallen out in a few ways — one is a
lot of talking to people and surveying what you actually like versus seeing how you interact with News Feed.
We’re doing more and more of that to understand what are the great
experiences and what are the not-great experiences, and how do we help
shift the not-great experiences to the great experiences."
It’s a minor change, and a relatively small offering when considering
what they have altered that negatively impacts their users. But at least
it's something. And with Facebook as powerful as it is, we pretty much
have to take what we can get.
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