Facebook is developing a metric that will track users' reading times for particular items in their News Feed, in order to rank them. The new algorithm will even include cases in which the social networking user does not Like or Share news stories.
Even non-interactions will have meaning. If users quickly scroll past an object on the News Feed, the Facebook artificial intelligence (AI) will learn that they are not interested in the subject.
However, if users stay put at a news post for a while, Facebook will start a timer in the background, according to Tech Crunch. By spending more time than usual on a News Feed item, whether users are reading a comment thread or closely looking at a great photo, Facebook will infer that they are interested in the items.
The big question mark is how this data will affect a Facebook News Feed. In the past, the social network's algorithms have greatly been based on active user behavior, such as Likes, Shares, and Comments.
However, the new metrics will instead focus on the analysis of passive signals. Interestingly, it is based on when users do not interact with the feed items, rather than when they take actions.
The new system will need some tweaking. For instance, sometimes users walk away from their desktops or laptops when the News Feed is on a dull news story, and in other cases users experience a slow Internet connection.
Facebook announced in a blog post that the tweaked algorithm is based on user feedback, according to Quartz. When users fail to interact about certain news stories, it does not imply that the topic is unimportant to them.
The social media giant has announced it will roll out the News Feed algorithm within the next few weeks. However, Facebook pages will not undergo "significant changes" due to the new update.