Facebook wants to deal with all the apps that post things on your behalf

May 28, 2014 13:39 GMT  ·  By

There’s too much noise on Facebook news feeds and the company knows this, which is why it intends to cut back on how much content from your friends’ third-party apps pop up for you to see. Instead, Facebook will prioritize “explicitly shared stories” in the news Feed.

The changes aren’t going to happen overnight, but rather over several months, so it will take some time before you actually see a drop in inane messages on your feed.

There are plenty of apps, especially games on the Facebook platform that post a bunch of stuff on your friends’ News Feeds that go undiscovered for months or until someone finally complains about all the spam.

“We’ve found that stories people choose to explicitly share from third party apps are typically more interesting and get more engagement in News Feed than stories shared from third party apps without explicit action,” Facebook said.

“We’ve also heard that people often feel surprised or confused by stories that are shared without taking an explicit action. In the coming months, we will continue to prioritize explicitly shared stories from apps in News Feed over implicitly shared stories,” the social network explains.

Basically, there will be fewer implicit stories from third-party apps in the future. This doesn’t mean that the content will disappear completely, just that the annoying messages will be excluded.

Facebook explains that in the past year, the number of implicitly shared apps in News Feed has declined naturally. In fact, the decline is apparently correlated with how often people mark app posts as spam, which dropped by 75 percent over the same time span.

Not too long ago, Facebook made another effort to weed out content that people didn’t really find relevant. For instance, messages from Pages are prioritized if they contain both photos and links over those that are solely made out of text.

The company has also taken a stance against spammy messages, vowing to weed them out. For instance, those who try to obtain likes for certain posts by begging friends to click the thumbs-up button will get penalized by Facebook. The update isn’t supposed to impact Pages that are trying to encourage discussion among fans.

Content that also gets posted and reposted by everyone will appear less in News Feeds in order to offer more diversity.

Spammy links have also made it on Facebook’s bad side. “Some stories in News Feed use inaccurate language or formatting to try and trick people into clicking through to a website that contains only ads or a combination of frequently circulated content and ads. For instance, often these stories claim to link to a photo album but instead take the viewer to a website with just ads.”