As someone who spends an unfortunately significant amount of time on Facebook, there are so many things I would like to see less often. Facebook’s parent company Meta has now, decades after its platform was released to the public, given us that option.
What we see in our Facebook feed is often fueled by the much-criticized algorithm. For instance, if you like a bunch of hiking Groups and Pages, interact with a ton of photos of the outdoors, and post about your backpacking adventures, you might be met with more recommended posts from creators and communities related to hiking. As Facebook puts it, « what you see in your Feed is uniquely personalized to your interests through machine learning. »
On Wednesday, Facebook announced that you can select « Show more » or « Show less » on posts that are recommended to you by Facebook and posts from people, pages, and communities you’re connected to organically. This will, ideally, give users a bit more control over its controversial algorithm.
« Selecting Show more will temporarily increase the ranking score for that post and posts like it, » Facebook said in a blog post. « If you select Show less, you’ll temporarily decrease its ranking score. By offering more ways to incorporate direct feedback into Feed ranking, we’re making our artificial intelligence systems smarter and more responsive. »
However, as Mashable’s Alex Perry points out, the option to see more or less of something on our feeds is designed to « give us the illusion of control over our feeds but seemingly no actual control. »
Still, if you’d like to give it a try yourself, you can select the Show more or Show less buttons by clicking on the three-dot menu at the upper right-hand corner of posts and selecting whichever option you’d like. The company also says it plans to test this feature in Reels too. Let’s see if this will make life on Facebook better or if we all should just throw the towel in and quit Meta for good this time.
