Photo by David Ramos/Getty Images(NEW YORK) — Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg says one of the social media platform’s goals for 2018 is to ensure users are shown more posts from people they care about.
In a post, the company said that its current system uses the number of likes, comments and shares a post receives to determine where on a user’s News Feed they appear. That ranking system will be altered to prioritize posts that “spark conversations and meaningful interactions between people.”
Doing that will require Facebook to “predict which posts you might want to interact with your friends about, and show these posts higher in feed.”
Some examples of the type of post that might be pushed higher, Facebook says, include posts from friends seeking advice, a friend seeking recommendations for a trip, or a news article that is prompting lots of discussion.
The new algorithm will also prioritize posts from friends and family over public content.
The changes could mean publishers see their reach and traffic decrease. Facebook says pages whose posts “prompt conversations between friends” will be less severely impacted.
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