A Peek Into Facebook’s Newsfeed Algorithm
This year marks the 10 year anniversary for Facebook’s Newsfeed feature. With that, TechCrunch took it upon themselves to interview some of Facebook’s team members to help the online community better understand how Facebook decides what to show on a user’s newsfeed. While the algorithm considers over 100,000 variables to create a relevancy score, the simplified version prioritizes 4 main areas: Creator, Post, Type, and Recency which respectively covers who posted the content, what interactions occur with the post, what type of content it is, and when it was posted.
In regards to the Creator, the more you have interacted (liked, commented, shared, etc…) with the post’s author in the past, the more likely said author’s posts will have a higher priority on your newsfeed. This heavily relates to our class discussion on strong and weak ties. If two users interact with each other often and in varied ways, there are more links between the two users, thus making their relationship a strong tie. So really, one can think of the strength of the tie between two users as a variable that is considered when determining what is shown on their newsfeeds.
Another variable they consider that relates to our discussion about graphs and tie strength is the number of other users that have posted the same thing. For instance, if there is a piece of content that is heavily shared by many of your peers, there is a large number of nodes (representing users) tied to that post. Though the strength of the ties (how close you are to the friends who reposted the content) plays an important role here, I would argue that the quantity of ties are just as equally relevant here.
Article Link: https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/06/ultimate-guide-to-the-news-feed/