Facebook is making your News Feed more about your actual friends

Facebook News FEed

Facebook's most recent News Feed updates have mainly been meant to show you more ads, mess with your emotions or change things up in ways that are barely even noticeable.

But the latest changes, meant to strike a better balance in your News Feed content, might actually improve things.

These changes are threefold. Most importantly, Facebook wants "to ensure that content posted directly by the friends you care about, such as photos, videos, status updates or links, will be higher up in News Feed so you are less likely to miss it."

"This update tries to make the balance of content the right one for each individual person," the announcement reads.

Today's update also relaxes a restriction that limits users from seeing multiple posts from the same sources, so that more content can be displayed if they run out of News Feed posts to read. Plus we'll see fewer posts about friends liking or commenting on other posts, and they'll be lower down than friends' direct posts and posts from pages we've Liked.

Getting closer

Facebook said in this announcement that "the goal of News Feed is to show you the content that matters to you," a fact that Facebook's users might not actually be aware of.

Hopefully that goal becomes more apparent, though, as the social network continues to tweak and jigger until things are just right.

Michael Rougeau

Michael Rougeau is a former freelance news writer for TechRadar. Studying at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Northeastern University, Michael has bylines at Kotaku, 1UP, G4, Complex Magazine, Digital Trends, GamesRadar, GameSpot, IFC, Animal New York, @Gamer, Inside the Magic, Comic Book Resources, Zap2It, TabTimes, GameZone, Cheat Code Central, Gameshark, Gameranx, The Industry, Debonair Mag, Kombo, and others.


Micheal also spent time as the Games Editor for Playboy.com, and was the managing editor at GameSpot before becoming an Animal Care Manager for Wags and Walks.