Facebook announced a new tweak to its News Feed algorithm, which deals specifically with how people hide stories. Essentially, there are some people that hide a lot of stories. Most don’t hide many, but a small, unspecified amount of Facebook users hide a lot more than others. The update reflects this specific small group of users.

Facebook explains in an announcement:

Many people choose to hide stories they don’t like, but most people do this only occasionally. Hiding something is usually a strong indication that someone didn’t want to see a particular post. There is also a small group of people on Facebook who hide a very high number of stories in their News Feed. In fact, some people hide almost every post in their News Feed, even after they’ve liked or commented on posts. For this group of people, “hide” isn’t as strong a negative signal, and in fact they may still want to see similar stories to the ones they’ve hidden in the future.
To do a better job of serving this small group, we made a small update to News Feed so that, for these people only, we don’t take “hide” into account as strongly as before. As a result, this group of people has started seeing more stories from the Pages and friends they are connected to than in the past. Overall, this tweak helps this group see more of the stuff they are interested in.

Facebook says it doesn’t expect Pages to see any significant changes in distribution, but does say they may see an increase in the Hides metric in their Insights. This is because the small group of users who hide a lot of stories will start seeing more stories, which means they’ll probably continue to keep hiding a large percentage of them.

Facebook does tell Pages on in their Insights that hides can decrease the number of people they reach, but from the sound of it, the new update won’t hurt you much in that department.

Good news for Pages sharing a lot of content is that people are interacting with links more on Facebook, according to a recent study from Adobe.

Image via Facebook