(CNN) — Facebook wants to make sure you don’t miss the most important updates, photos, humblebrags and baby announcements from your friends.
The company on Tuesday announced a tweak to its News Feed that will take a popular story — one that’s getting lots of comments and likes — and put it back at the top of your feed to make sure you don’t miss it.
On a typical day, the average Facebook user is only seeing 20% of the posts from friends and pages that he or she follows. Where are the rest? Filtered out by Facebook, using algorithms it has developed to determine the stories and posts the social network thinks you’ll care about most.
Now Facebook has decided to shed some light on the mysterious decisions that go into ranking the stories in the news feed. People have grumbled in the past about not having a pure, kitchen-sink feed of all their friends’ updates, so the company is explaining a little about how it does what it does.
To figure out what posts to show, Facebook looks at a person’s most recent everyday actions such as liking, sharing or hiding posts, the amount of interaction they have with people or pages, and a post’s popularity among their group of friends.
