The days of seeing your Facebook news feed clogged up with nonsense from that girl you went to primary school with may soon be a thing of the past.
Facebook have announced a change to the news feed algorithm which means we will see more status updates and photos from friends whose profiles we actually visit, rather than the tirade of noise we usually get from companies and people we added following a drunken night out two years ago.
According to the blog post about the changes, Facebook believes ‘people are worried about missing important updates from friends they care about’.
Facebook product manager Max Eulenstein and user experience researcher Lauren Scissors said: ‘Content posted directly by the friends you care about, such as photos, videos, status updates or links, will be higher up in News Feed so you are less likely to miss it.
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‘If you like to read news or interact with posts from pages you care about, you will still see that content in News Feed. This update tries to make the balance of content the right one for each individual person.’
The changes also promise to limit the amount posts from someone you don’t know appear in your news feed simply because a friend liked it.
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As Guardian journalist Stuart Dredge points out this can also lead to unfortunate situations where elderly relatives see you commenting on things you would rather they didn’t know about.
But don’t worry, you will still be able to waste hours of your life scrolling through your news feed.
Max and Lauren explain: ‘Previously, we had rules in place to prevent you from seeing multiple posts from the same source in a row. With this update, we are relaxing this rule.
‘Now if you run out of content, but want to spend more time in News Feed, you’ll see more.’