Facebook Wants To Make Comments More Meaningful

There seems to be an algorithm for everything nowadays, as social media platforms work harder to control what we see within our feeds.

Facebook (like many other social media platforms) wants you to spend more time on it, interacting with (what both you believe to be) meaningful content. It’s as simple as this. 

Everything the social networking giant does, everything it actions as a company, everything that goes into it’s algorithm, is to further this goal. It wants to keep users on Facebook, for longer periods of time, feeling content interacting with, well, Facebook content. And this boils right down to the comments you see within posts on your feed.

A few days ago, Facebook shared a press release on its blog explaining why users see particular comments when interacting with a popular posts (as opposed to ones posted in chronological order).

Here’s what goes into why we see what we see when it comes to Facebook comments.  

How Facebook Ranks Public Comments

According to Facebook in addition to ranking posts in people’s News Feed, the social network ranks comments on public posts from Pages and people with a lot of followers (as these posts tend to have many comments).

In order to show users relevant and quality comments, a number of factors (known as “signals” by Facebook) goes into determining the comments we see on content within the platform… 

• Integrity signals. Facebook is committed to keeping the platform a safe place for its users. If a comment violates their Community Standards, it’s removed. They also take into account other signals (ex. engagement or click-bait, borderline comments, etc.) to address the integrity of information, and improve the quality of comments users see and interact with.

• What users tell Facebook they want to see in comments. The platform has been using surveys to help it understand the types of comments users want to see, so they can then rank those higher.

• How users interact with comments. Whenever you like, reply or comment on a comment within a post, Facebook takes this into account. It will then ensure you see comments in other posts, that you’re more likely to interact with.

• What the poster controls. Users can moderate the comments on their post by hiding, deleting, or engaging with comments. Ranking is on by default for Pages and people with a a lot of followers, but Pages and people with a lot of followers can choose to turn off comment ranking. People who don’t have as many followers will not have comment ranking turned on automatically since there are less comments overall, but any person can decide to enable comment ranking by going to their settings.

For more information on how Facebook ranks comments, click here.

What are your thoughts? Let us know in the comments below.

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