Facebook Has Ditched Human Curators For Its Trending Topics

Facebook’s search usually gets love from the company from time to time and the last time it was given an update, it brought about trending topics that were of great interest in the network. Unlike trending topics on Twitter, Facebook’s was maintained by a team which was under fire after a report by Gizmodo shun a light of how the team maintains it.

The company wants to change that from a blogpost where Facebook has updated trending topics by eliminating the human aspect of it. The process to determine the trending topics will be now algorithimically driven and you will see a change when compared to the human curated version.

As you can see, you will notice the simpler description of the topic in the new version as compared to the old human curated way which was more descriptive. It looks like what Twitter does with its trending topics where you have the trending topic and below it and the engagement numbers. As usual, the topics shown will be custom from the pages you liked, your location, trending topics you interacted previously or what is trending on Facebook.

However, it is not “human free” as the company points out that some aspects need human intervention to make the list “high quality” like example #lunch can be a trending topic every day during lunchtime but it will not be shown as a trending topic.

It is commendable Facebook has decided to rely on algorithms to make sure trending topics reflect what is happening in the world which will make it catch up with Twitter.