May The Feed Be With You: how algorithmic feeds create the best content experience for users

The introduction of the “feed” in modern social media has been controversial. At its core, “algorithmic curation is ultimately about power — about who controls what we see and how we see it.” As our lawmakers now discuss this question on Capitol Hill, most of the discussion is centered around how we can “fix” the feed. However, our political and te... See more

It’s ultimately a math question: are you more likely to find compelling content from the few hundred people in your social network, or from the millions of people posting on the service? The answer is obviously the latter, but that answer is only achievable if you have the means of discovering that compelling content, and, to be fair to both Facebo... See more

In that same earning call Zuckerberg talked about how there’s a “major shift” towards discovery algorithms, because it “unlocks a large amount of interesting and useful videos and posts you might have otherwise missed.” But he doesn’t just see this as unique to Reels / TikTok. He wants to turn this into a major drive for all types of content across... See more

Historically, Facebook has taken an entity-centric approach to discovery. We help you connect with the friends, groups, and pages you care about most. Then updates from those connections are ranked in Feed. Unconnected content in Feed was surfaced via reshares from the friends, groups, and pages you follow, but unconnected recommendations weren’t h... See more

Last week, Meta announced that the Facebook newsfeed would be shifting towards an algorithmic, recommendation-based model of content distribution. This announcement marked the most recent example of a major platform to formally make this shift, while other major platforms, including Meta’s Instagram, have been headed in this direction for a while. ... See more

But ultimately, content ranking is a dynamic partnership between people and algorithms. On Facebook, it takes two to tango.