Facebook has rolled out an update to its newsfeed to better cover articles that might be interesting to users based on how long they and others read them.
To find out which articles should be prioritised, Facebook surveyed thousands of people in its Feed Quality Program. The respondents were asked to rate their Facebook experience every day and give feedback to what could be improved.
The programme showed that taking an action on Facebook, for example, liking, clicking, commenting or sharing a post, does not mean those are the only types of content users want to see.
"We've found that there are stories people don't like or comment on that they still want to see, such as articles about a serious current event, or sad news from a friend," the tech giant said in a blogpost.
Based on this feedback, the updated newsfeed will rank stories according to how much time users spend reading similar posts, regardless of whether they opened the article or not.
The tweaked newsfeed will also take into account times when users clicked on an article and came straight back to the newsfeed. This is because feedback has showed this often happened when the article someone clicked on wasn't what they had expected from the post or the headline.
The update takes into account how long the average person should take to read or watch the content, so as not to give longer articles preferential treatment.
A separate update will reduce how often users see several posts in a row from the same source in their newsfeed.
The updated newsfeed will be rolled out to all users of the mobile app and Web browser version over the next few weeks.
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