The end goal for the world’s largest social network isn’t just to guess what you’ll click on when you’re bored. The company’s growing army of human raters help the social network improve the News Feed experience in ways that can’t easily be measured by “Likes.” A new curation tool launching Thursday, for instance, called “See First” will let any user choose which of their friends they want to see at the top of the feed, rather than having the decision dictated by an algorithm. Increasingly, though, Facebook is injecting a human element into the way News Feed operates. But it’s also led to a growing anxiety about how much Facebook knows, and how the company can use that knowledge to influence what users buy, how they vote, even how they feel. That proved successful in helping News Feed generate more revenue for Facebook than any other part of the site. For years, the News Feed has been fueled by automated software that tracks each user’s actions to serve them the posts they’re most likely to engage with. Over the past nine years, the product, which was initially controversial, has evolved into the most valuable billboard on Earth-for brands, for publishers, for celebrities and for the rest of us. News Feed is at the epicenter of Facebook’s success. That has turned Facebook into an online advertising behemoth that generated $12.5 billion in revenue in 2014. American users spend nearly as much time on the site per day (39 minutes) as they do socializing with people face-to-face (43 minutes). The company runs the second-most-popular website in the world and the most-used mobile app in the United States. Nearly a billion people around the world now look at Facebook daily. In 2014 when the program launched, the social network had already tuned the News Feed into a powerful engine, sucking up our time and pumping out ad revenue. This is a relatively new vision for how to keep users hooked on Facebook-by asking users themselves. Their assessments, as well as ratings from about 700 other reviewers around the United States, are later fed back to the team in California, all in the service of improving Facebook’s News Feed algorithm, the software that delivers personalized streams of content. They are tasked with scrolling through their News Feeds to assess how well the site places stories relative to their personal preferences. In Knoxville, a group of 30 contract workers sit in a room full of desktop computers, getting paid to surf Facebook. They’re tasked with assessing the billions of likes, comments and clicks Facebook users make each day to divine ways to make us like, comment and click more. The other is in a nondescript office park in Knoxville, Tennessee.Īt Facebook headquarters in California, about 20 engineers and data scientists meet every Tuesday in the “John Quincy Adding Machine” room-“Abraham Linksys” and “Dwight DVD Eisenhower” are nearby. One is in a corner of Facebook’s new 430,000-foot, Frank Gehry-designed building in Menlo Park, California. There are two very important rooms that will help determine the future of the Facebook News Feed and, by extension, the way more than a billion people communicate.
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