Facebook Announces Updated Ranking Factors for Post Comments
Facebook Announces Updated Ranking Factors for Post Comments
Facebook has a page ranking system for comments, where Facebook will list comments of people you know first, followed by a ranked list with the most liked and replied to comments. Also, as seen in the screenshot below, Facebook also has ranks comments based on top fans, which is called a “top fan” comment. There are many different factors that are considered when Facebook ranks comments, and there are two new factors including: the comments have interactions from the page or person who originally posted, and the comments or reactions are from friends of the person who posted. In the article, it mentions that if a page has a lot of followers, Facebook will turn on the “comment ranking,” and will start to rank pages based on integrity signals, insights from user surveys, engagement factors and the factors mentioned.
This article is directly related to the course topic of page rankings. In class, we have been discussing how Google has to “crawl” the web to index all of the webs information and structure the most relevant web pages on the top. Google’s issue is that there are many good answers to certain questions like “what are good restaurants in Ithaca” and Google has to arrange the answers in a specific order. In class, we learned that Google does this by using a Basic Page Rank Update. The steps are: initiating that the hubs and authorities are equal to 1, then doing an authority update, a hub update and then normalizing the scores to sum to 1 for the hubs and authorities. Facebook faces a similar problem to Google, where there is an abundance of information, and there needs to be a specific algorithm to organize the top comments. Therefore, Facebook has created an algorithm as seen above in the article, with factors that are considered.
On the other hand, although the article mentions this specific algorithm, I thought that the algorithm created in class for Google could be applied directly to Facebook. For example, there is a popular page on Facebook called Cornell Memes, where there are multiple comments. According to the page rank update learned in class, we can define the authority as “a post on the Cornell meme Facebook page” and the hub as the “comments on the post.” Then, you could create a ranking for the comments on Facebook by updating the hubs and the authorities. After doing an update, you can rank the comments on Facebook accordingly.