By Sami Tas, Software Engineer & Meihong Wang, Engineering Manager
The goal of News Feed is to show you the content that matters to you. The actions people take on Facebook—liking, commenting or sharing a post—are some of the main factors we consider to determine what to show at the top of your News Feed. We also offer the option to hide stories that you don’t want to see in News Feed. This helps us learn the kinds of stories you don’t enjoy, so we can do a better job in the future.
Many people choose to hide stories they don’t like, but most people do this only occasionally. Hiding something is usually a strong indication that someone didn’t want to see a particular post. There is also a small group of people on Facebook who hide a very high number of stories in their News Feed. In fact, some people hide almost every post in their News Feed, even after they’ve liked or commented on posts. For this group of people, “hide” isn’t as strong a negative signal, and in fact they may still want to see similar stories to the ones they’ve hidden in the future.
To do a better job of serving this small group, we made a small update to News Feed so that, for these people only, we don’t take “hide” into account as strongly as before. As a result, this group of people has started seeing more stories from the Pages and friends they are connected to than in the past. Overall, this tweak helps this group see more of the stuff they are interested in.
How will this affect my Page?
This update means that the small group of people who hide many stories will start to see more stories in their News Feed, and so will likely hide more stories overall. This means that the total number of hidden stories across Facebook will increase – so Page admins may see an increase in this metric in their Page Insights. We do not expect Pages to see significant changes in distribution as a result of this update.