ABC News is reporting that Facebook, in a rare move toward satisfying its customer base, may be taking steps toward something that users have been asking after for a long time.
It’s not exactly a “dislike” button, though a lot of people wish they could get a thumbs down button like other sites have. But Facebook already allows you to hide things from your feed. When you do that, Facebook starts showing you fewer items from that person.
Trouble is, it’s currently hard to tell what it is about a post that someone wants to get rid of. Perhaps they want to see less from that person. But it could just as easily be that they don’t want to see that kind of content at all. Maybe it is a Spotify playlist or track post. The person does not have or want to have Spotify or to see those posts. It would be nice to just be able to tell Facebook that, in some way.
“Over the next few months what you will see from us is more on why people like and don’t like certain things in their feed,” Facebook’s Product Manager for Ads Fidji Simo said. “We are planning to refine those so users can tell us exactly the reasons they are hiding that piece of content.”
There are no specifics forthcoming yet. But users are told to expect rollouts and tweaks over the next few months.
“If a lot of people start reporting that something is offensive, it’s something we would probably not show to a lot more users,” she explained. “If you tell us that something is uninteresting we would show you less about that, but we wouldn’t use that signal with other users.”
Similar filtering questions are already in place when a user chooses to hide an ad, though many report that even when specifying why you want a particular ad hidden – e.g. “against my views”, etc. – those ads often still pop back up, even 3 or more times.