Tech

Facebook News Feed changes again: Now it's all about time spent reading

Facebook's News Feed algorithm now factors in how much time you've spent looking at a post, on top of whether you've Liked, commented on or shared it.

IMAGE: MASHABLE, WILL FENSTERMAKER

BY JP MANGALINDAN2 DAYS AGO

Facebook revealed on Friday that it has tweaked the stream of information you get on the service once again — this time to factor in the amount of time you spend looking at a post.

Previously, how high or low a post showed up in your News Feed — or if it showed up at all — depended on how much your Facebook friends liked, commented on, or shared it. But no longer.

"It’s not as simple as just measuring the number of seconds you spend on each story," wrote Facebook software engineer Ansha Yu in a company blog post Friday. "Some people may spend 10 seconds on a story because they really enjoy it, while others may spend 10 seconds on a story because they have a slow Internet connection."

The solution? "We’ve discovered that

if people spend significantly more time on a particular story in News Feed than the majority of other stories they look at, this is a good sign that content was relevant to them

if people spend significantly more time on a particular story in News Feed than the majority of other stories they look at, this is a good sign that content was relevant to them," Yu added.

So if you spend a lot of time glancing over a News Feed post with photos from your sister's wedding, say, Facebook now notices that, factors in how long the post is on your screen, and places any other photo-based posts from your sister higher up in your News Feed.

The aim is to make the News Feed more compelling and interesting for users and ultimately boost overall time spent on the social network — by treating time spent on a post as another measure of interaction. How often do you check out your News Feed, and linger on an interesting post without liking, commenting or sharing it?

This is also the latest in a long series of News Feed tweaks Facebook makes for accuracy and relevance. This April, for example, the social network announced it had adjusted the News Feed algorithm to emphasize updates from friends versus content from Pages.

Later that month, it updated the algorithm again, this time to downplay posts highlighting what a friend Liked or commented — they either show up lower in your News Feed or don't show up at all.

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Liam Merlyn1 day ago

This is pretty good. As a user and page admin, I often trawl through my newsfeed and spend significant amount of time reading articles on the feed but I rarely actually interact with the post. I suspect this will help greatly for other pages who's fans read the content but don't interact.