Facebook is re-tweaking its News Feed again.
This time it wants to bring it back to friends and family instead of viral videos and media posts, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in a post Thursday.
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'I'm changing the goal I give our product teams from focusing on helping you find relevant content to helping you have more meaningful social interactions,' he wrote.
In order to truly live a happy frugal life, you need to know your priorities. I have a planner to jot down weekly tasks and appointments, but to also have written evidence of my goals and aspirations for the year. This could be anything from ‘learn 3 new recipes this year’ to ‘save enough to get a mortgage on a house’ – you do you! Be Happy, Waikoloa, Hawaii. 1,420,860 likes 1,198,784 talking about this. Hi, my name is Maya and I started Be Happy to help encourage others to live a Happy Life. Being Happy is a choice.
He said the change should make everyone feel better: 'The research shows that when we use social media to connect with people we care about, it can be good for our well-being. We can feel more connected and less lonely, and that correlates with long term measures of happiness and health.'
With fewer posts from businesses, brands, and media, expect to see more of what your 'friends' are sharing and liking.
A key difference between this and the change from 2016 is this is a refocus on meaningful interactions between people – things like friends commenting back and forth about anything, including media – whereas in 2016 we were focused on people seeing more stories from friends.
— Adam Mosseri (@mosseri) January 12, 2018
Zuckerberg didn't mention Facebook's role in the 2016 election or Russian meddling through the platform as motivation to change what shows up on the social network.
A breakdown of the 'closer together' initiative (also outlined in a video above) indicates news stories will get de-prioritized, while conversations that Facebook thinks will spark a lot of engagement will get a boost.
To achieve a happier Facebook user base, it looks like Facebook will focus on comment-heavy posts — and not just quick comments like, 'Oh no!' or 'Thanks!' but lengthy (meaningful!) comments.
We look at both what people do in reaction to and what people say about their interactions on Facebook. Much of what we’ve learned is relatively intuitive, like longer comments tend to be more meaningful to the recipient than shorter ones.
— Adam Mosseri (@mosseri) January 12, 2018
All those 'likes' won't mean as much as full-on engagement, which under the new rules seems to mean back-and-forth conversations. Sounds like posting links back and forth won't count as much in the meaningfulness meter.
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Comments tend to me more meaningful than likes for one. Another is when someone adds context to something the find and share people find the story more meaning than when they don’t.
— Adam Mosseri (@mosseri) January 12, 2018
In other words, publishers will almost certainly see traffic drop and video views decrease.
Zuckerberg rationalized that the changes will ultimately make for a better Facebook experience, naturally, but might actually cause people to spend less time on the social network.
'I also expect the time you do spend on Facebook will be more valuable,' he wrote.
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UPDATE: Jan. 11, 2018, 5:07 p.m. PST This post has been updated with more information about the News Feed changes.