Facebook revealed today plans to show you less content that is posted automatically by your friends’ third-party apps and instead prioritize “explicitly shared stories” in your News Feed. The changes will be made in the coming months.
We’ve all had it happen – sign up for a new app with your Facebook login, only to discover months later that it has been posting every single thing you do to your friends’ News Feeds.
According to Facebook, some users have felt “surprised or confused” by content that just appears without choosing to share. The Verge notes that users had been marking implicitly-shared posts as spam. Hopefully, now you won’t have to see every single song that your friends listened to last night and every video they watched.
Facebook provides information about the changes on its developer blog, including alternative sharing options to auto-posting. The company recently adjusted its own Instagram app to stop auto-posting content to Facebook and instead rely on users choosing to share.
At its F8 developer conference in April, Facebook announced that it has added granular permissions to Facebook Login so that users can choose the specific functionality and data an app has access to. Today’s announcement follows in that same thread and should be an overall win for the user experience and a loss for apps that relied on flooding your friends’ feeds to grow.
➤ Giving People More Control Over When They Share from Apps [Facebook]
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