Facebook comments are a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Some people beam proudly about their best Facebook comments ever; others recoil at the annoying Facebook comments they have to deal with on a daily basis; while some constantly worry if they can delete their Facebook comments, thinking, will they know if I did?
We all have a different relationship with Facebook, which is why we can see the same things differently. This is why Facebook, and other social networks like Twitter, have long eschewed showing things like your feed or post comments chronologically and have since attempted to rank everything according to how each of us uses Facebook individually. We don’t see the most recent Facebook comments, not even the most awesome Facebook comments; according to the social giant, we see Facebook’s most relevant comments.
Facebook is trying to make your comments more meaningful
In a recent blog post, Facebook announced a series of changes it is making to its public comments ranking system. The idea behind the change is to make Facebook comments more meaningful to the people that read them but also in relation to the original post they’re commenting on.
Facebook states, “Ranking is on by default for Pages and people with a lot of followers, but Pages and people with a lot of followers can choose to turn off comment ranking. People who don’t have as many followers will not have comment ranking turned on automatically since there are less comments overall, but any person can decide to enable comment ranking by going to their settings.” This means your comments likely won’t be ranked if you say something about a post from a friend or family member but if you comment on posts by a popular Facebook Page or account, they will be.
How Facebook ranks comments
Facebook looks at a number of different factors when it ranks a comment. These are integrity signals, which are designed to keep comments safe by removing comments that violate Facebook’s Community standards and clickbaity comments; how Facebook users have responded in official Facebook surveys; comment interaction; and the various controls Facebook gives the poster of the original post. You can find more information about toggling ranking on and off for comments on your posts here.
What changes is Facebook making to its comment ranking system?
There are two major changes Facebook is making to how it ranks public comments. Comments will rank higher if they have interactions with “the Page or person who originally posted.” The other factor Facebook is now considering is whether the comments or reactions are from friends of the person who made the original post.
Facebook hopes that these changes will make the publicly viewable comments on prominent posts much more meaningful to the people reading them. This slight tweak, however, will no doubt delight some Facebook users and annoy others.
