14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook has announced a change to its news feed algorithm, taking into account the time users spend reading a story on the timeline and using this information to present them with better news and updates in the future.
Facebook's feed has always been under criticism from its users for showing them non-essential or irrelevant stories, too many ads, or updates from people that aren't really their friends.
This is the issue that Facebook addressed through its latest change, now measuring how much people spend reading a story and using that information to prioritize future updates.
The new news story ranking algorithm actually makes a lot of sense
The way the algorithm works is very simple. When users scroll down their timeline, whenever they pause to look at a specific story, even if they don't comment, click, like, or share it, that time spent looking or reading the update is still taken into account.
This is very useful for political stories, long-winded text-based posts, interesting photos, etc., where users don't have anything to comment, or they don't want to.
Pausing from scrolling down the feed just to look at anything means the user has found something interesting in their news feed, which should be taken into account when delivering them related stories the next time.
Extreme results are eliminated from the algorithm's recordings
The downside is that bad Internet connection or people that put their mobile device down for a few seconds, or just pause scrolling on their desktop to deal with other issues can produce misleading results.
To counteract this, Facebook will aggregate results from different accounts, eliminating measurements with extreme values and getting an overall look at the story from the views of multiple users.
From a UX researcher's perspective, this algorithm makes a lot of sense, catering to Facebook's passive userbase, the ones that don't like to interact with other users and just use the network to stay up to date with news, their friends, or make fun of people taking bad selfies.
This update will start taking effect in the coming days, and should not alter in any way the delivery of news stories from Facebook Pages, as per the official Facebook press release.