Facebook’s ‘high quality’ News Feed tweaking decoded!

Washington – Facebook recently announced that it will be tweaking the News Feed of its users in order to deliver them more ‘high quality’ content by pushing down things like ‘ meme photos’ harder to see, however, this has apparently upset publishers of such content.

Google had adopted a similar move in 2011, and changed the way it ranked websites, to punish spammers and ‘content farms’ that showed up high in search results but delivered crummy pages.

However, when Facebook’s News Feed manager Lars Backstorm was questioned about what exactly the social networking giant is intending to do with those cute cat photos that people ‘Like’, he said that it is not about demoting certain kind of content but generating something which has more value, AllThingsD reports.

Backstorm said that before planning the change, a lot of people were surveyed about which of which of those things they get more value from and found that people enjoyed cat photo but valuable articles enriched their life more.

When he was asked if the site was focusing on the content or the source, Backstorm said that initially they will be mostly targeting the source so as to distinguish between different types of content and identifying the ‘ high quality’ content will be based at the source level.

According to the report, Facebook doesn’t necessarily aim to completely remove the cute photos that users can’t help sharing or ‘liking’, but the site would surely cut down on their frequency of appearance in the feed.

Backstorm said that the goal is to provide user value and to make Facebook as personalized as possible by giving users what they really want to see, the report added.