There is a good chance that you probably spend more time on Facebook than you realize and Facebook is taking great advantage of that. Regardless of how you use the social network, though, the social network is using your eyes to determine how to best regulate content.
Depending on what you look at and how long you look at it (and how often), Facebook will use your web time to determine how relevant the content actually is, according to users.
“There are times when, for example, people want to see information about a serious current event, but don’t necessarily want to like or comment on it,” the social network said. “Based on this finding, we are updating News Feed’s ranking to factor in a new signal—how much time you spend viewing a story in your News Feed.”
You won’t exactly notice that anything is different when you use Facebook. The shift they are making is basically an algorithm that just tracks the duration of your perusing.
Furthermore, Facebook software engineers Ansha Yu and Sami Tas comment, “When talking to people about the way they use their News Feed, we’ve found that it’s not as simple as just measuring the number of seconds you spend on each story to understand if that piece of content resonated with you. Some people may spend ten seconds on a story because they really enjoy it, while others may spend ten seconds on a story because they have a slow internet connection. We’ve discovered that if people spend significantly more time on a particular story in News Feed than the majority of other stories they look at, this is a good sign that content was relevant to them.”
Source: Pioneer News
