Facebook is going to start showing you more posts from your friends again
If you scroll through your Facebook News Feed on a given day, chances are you see lots of articles and videos from media publishers.
Starting Wednesday, Facebook is going to start showing you more posts from people you're friends with in the News Feed.
"We've heard from our community that people are still worried about missing important updates from the friends they care about," Facebook said in a statement.
Since April 2015, Facebook has ranked outside stories shared by friends higher in the News Feed, according to engineering director Lars Backstrom. More recently, the social network has been prioritizing live videos higher in the News Feed.
Now Facebook is getting back to its roots by surfacing more of the original content people post, like photo albums and status updates. Recent reports have said that Facebook is battling a decline in this kind of "original sharing."
"Facebook was built on the idea of connecting people with their friends and family," said News Feed chief Adam Mosseri in a company blog post. "That is still the driving principle of News Feed today. Our top priority is keeping you connected to the people, places and things you want to be connected to - starting with the people you are friends with on Facebook."
Mosseri noted that Facebook will learn from each user's behavior to determine which friends to place higher in the News Feed.
"We learn from you and adapt over time," he said. "For example, if you tend to like photos from your sister, we'll start putting her posts closer to the top of your feed so you won't miss what she posted while you were away."
Facebook expects Wednesday's change to potentially reduce how many people see stories from media publishers in the News Feed.
"Overall, we anticipate that this update may cause reach and referral traffic to decline for some Pages," said Backstrom in a Facebook blog post. "The specific impact on your Page's distribution and other metrics may vary depending on the composition of your audience. For example, if a lot of your referral traffic is the result of people sharing your content and their friends liking and commenting on it, there will be less of an impact than if the majority of your traffic comes directly through Page posts."