In fact, Facebook is pretty much concerned about the time you spend glancing at your news feeds. Even though the contents in our news feeds may interest us, we might not always be comfortable to like, share or comment on it. Either we do not have the time to do that or we simply ignore. Reasons can be many. Suppose, there is a news feed on somebody’s death or some natural calamity, liking it would make one feel absurd. Irrespective of the fact that the feed was very informative and useful. Not responding to a post does not make a post less worthy and Facebook very well understands that.
Facebook is trying to flex some of its existing algorithms to calculate a new unit. This unit will be able to determine the amount of time a person spent just staring at a post. This particular unit will not depend on any other kind of active user interactions.
What can be the purpose of such a metric?
According to Facebook, it will help them in delivering the posts to concerned people with more precision. If a person spends some time reading a post, the Facebook will start its undercover timer. The time you spent going through the comments, glancing at a pic etc will be taken into account. A comparative analysis will be performed on the time you spent for each post. Facebook then decides what kind of feeds interests a particular person.
On the contrary, if a person scrolls through a post without giving it any attention, Facebook will automatically mark it as a less important post for that person. However, its accuracy is very much doubted as some of the users may not be actually looking at a post. Maybe they have just kept the post on and they are doing some other side business that takes them too long.Neverthless, Facebook is hoping for the best and is very much determined in implementing this metric.
