Over the years, Facebook has been adapting to its users / Web
That very human and ancestral impulse that consists of knowing how others live and what others do is also the engine of Facebook, a social network that, close to its twenty-year anniversary, arouses the interest of some two billion active users worldwide.
This was in fact recognized by Facebook’s own vice president, Tom Alison, who said that users of the social network mostly come to it for two uses that are clearly imposed above the rest: connecting and discovering.
“People keep coming (to Facebook) to connect with their friends and family because they want to see what they’re up to. They even do that with the communities they are part of because they have significant groups and they want to see what happens with them,” Alison said.
In the interview, the manager commented, however, that currently it is possible to speak of a second use.
“We want to show users what it is about beyond their network of friends”
“Some (users) say they come to be entertained, some to discover something new, or sometimes it’s just to see what’s going on in the world and we talk about discovery, so we’re trying to help people with that,” he said.
For the Meta executive, discovering new content is a way for users to explore, whether on their cell phones or desktop devices.
This second form of use that Facebook users have has motivated the application to seek to make investments related to enhancing this experience and making it more comfortable for users.
Given “there are many people in the world doing interesting things, we want to show (Facebook users) what it is about beyond their network of friends,” said Alison, in dialogue with Infobae, mentioning that the social network has started to aim “towards the recommendations” of content not necessarily related to the environment of its users but that it considers could be of interest to them.
For the company representative, thanks to the recommendations “many conversations are generated between contacts or friends within the platform.”
“If something interesting is found, it is possible that it will be shared with another person and a dialogue will be generated. We combine both needs (connect and discover) so that people feel that Facebook is a good place to do it, ”he told the Argentine newspaper.
The vice president of Facebook stressed, however, that users are in control of the content.
RECOMMENDATIONS UNDER CONTROL
“Recommendations generated on Facebook are not outside the control of users, but rather, on the contrary, they can be shaped according to the tastes of people who consume content within the social network,” Alison said, commenting that “people should have a sense of control and Facebook does that in different ways.
“People keep coming back to connect with their friends and family because they want to see what they’re up to. They even do that with the communities they are part of because they have significant groups and they want to see what happens with them.”
Tom Alison
Facebook Vice President
The manager also mentioned that the first method to take control of what people want to see on the platform is the “Feed” section, in which you can see the updates published by the user’s contacts in chronological order and without filters, so that only by entering users will be able to have an overview of what their closest friends are doing within the platform.
Alison also said that people with an active Facebook account will be able to tell the social network’s algorithm when they want to see more than one post in their Photo, Stories or Reels format.
As a user “you can hide things: we have options to ‘show more’ or ‘show less’. So you can view a story and mark it as something you want to see more or less often. That’s our attempt to get you to tell us when something works for you and when it doesn’t,” he explained.
