Facebook has announced that it will be tweaking its news feed to make it more relevant.
On Monday, December 2, Facebook announced the update to its news feed ranking and revealed that it will begin showing more links to news articles to members when they visit the site, especially via their smartphones.
The alteration to the ranking system will make some news articles more prominent than other content like photos.
"We've noticed that people enjoy seeing articles on Facebook, and so we're now paying closer attention to what makes for high quality content, and how often articles are clicked on from News Feed on mobile. What this means is that you may start to notice links to articles a little more often (particularly on mobile)," wrote Facebook Engineering Manager Varun Kacholia and Software Engineer Minwen Ji.
The site notes that people prefer "high quality" content pertaining to current events over memes and, therefore, the company is laying stress on how regularly articles are clicked via news feed to aid the site in delivering more relevant posts.
"We'll be doing a better job of distinguishing between a high quality article on a website versus a meme photo hosted somewhere other than Facebook," opted the company in a blog post.
Facebook's recent move to imbibe more news into its timeline could be prompted by Twitter's growing success as a news platform. Per Pew Research's study, only 47 percent of Facebook's users access news from the site, compared to 52 percent users on Twitter. Reddit was the leader with 62 percent users garnering news from the site.
At this juncture, it is unclear how Facebook will define news. Moreover, how the move will affect UpWorthy and BuzzFeed, known for viral videos and GIFs, is not known.
Additionally, not all users will likely be happy at the prospect of Facebook removing memes in favor of "high quality" content like news articles. Many Facebook pages are meme-based and quite popular with users and have garnered several million "Likes."
For the new news feed ranking system to succeed, Facebook will require to balance the light-hearted content with serious news.
