Meta is rolling out updates to the Facebook Feed that give users additional ways to tell the company what kind of content they want to see.
“Show more” and “show less” buttons will begin appearing below posts from friends and recommended content on users’ news feeds, Meta announced today in a blog post. Clicking the options temporarily increases or decreases how similar content is ranked, resulting in a more fine-tuned feed of content users actually want to see so they spend more time on the platform.
“By offering more ways to incorporate direct feedback into Feed ranking, we’re making our artificial intelligence systems smarter and more responsive,” the company says in the blog post. The buttons will also appear in the three-dot menu on individual posts and in the Feed preferences settings and will be coming to Reels as well.
Meta already has an assortment of different ways users can tell Facebook and Instagram what they want to see — and what will keep them coming back. On Facebook, users can already hide posts, which is supposed to prompt the platform to cut back on the amount of related content. Users can also tweak their Feed preferences to customize which posts they see by adding favorite friends or snoozing posts from other users, groups, and pages. In August, Instagram announced it would be testing a way for users to make lists of keywords and emoji that they’re not interested in, a more granular way of signaling content preferences.
Meta has made it clear that Facebook’s Feed, originally meant as a place to connect with friends, is changing rapidly in an era of TikTok dominance. TikTok’s addictiveness comes from its powerful recommendation algorithm that keeps people entertained and scrolling, and Meta has a lot of catching up to do if it hopes to keep growing its user base. Maybe it should go back to the news feed sliders?