Facebook wants to ditch the meme and focus on news delivery

Facebook was never really meant to be about news. It is a social network that's about keeping in touch with people. But companies quickly cottoned onto the site as a valuable tool for reaching out to customers, delivering information about product launches, app updates and other news. Despite the fact that Facebook users are invited to update their "status", anything that is posted appears in the "News Feed" of others. Now Facebook is trying to make your News Feed more about news.

There have been endless complaints about the order in which posts are displayed in the News Feed, and the presence of ads, but this latest update has been brought in to help further separate the wheat from the chaff. Having conducted a survey, Facebook has come to the conclusion that its users are more interested in seeing high quality content than countless images of cats and bastardized Keep Calm posters.

"Starting soon, we’ll be doing a better job of distinguishing between a high quality article on a website versus a meme photo hosted somewhere other than Facebook when people click on those stories on mobile. This means that high quality articles you or others read may show up a bit more prominently in your News Feed, and meme photos may show up a bit less prominently".

But it doesn’t end there. Facebook is not only keen to provide you with links to a high quality story to keep you educated, informed and entertained, it wants you to keep reading non-meme content. Should you click a link to a story have has been deemed to be of suitably high quality you will start to see more related links to stories that are either in a similar vein, or from the same source.

The updates will also see Facebook trying to increase users' interactions with stories. How often have you posted a comment on something you've stumbled across, but then don’t bother to check back to see if people you know are also posting comments? In the near future, posts that have received new comments -- particularly those commented on by your friends -- will be bumped to the top of your newsfeed.

What do you make of the changes? Are you happy that Facebook tries to deliver content it thinks you'll be interested in, or would you rather be left to your own devices?

Photo Credit: Sebastian Kaulitzki/Shutterstock

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