Facebook has announced that it will stop writing descriptions for Trending topics and short story summaries. The title will now be automated using algorithm. Trending lets people discover interesting and relevant conversations happening on Facebook. According to Quartz, Facebook has fired entire editorial staff on the Trending team that had 15-18 workers. Facebook says that there are still people involved to ensure that the topics that appear in Trending remain high-quality.
After the latest update, Instead of showing a story description in Trending, it just shows a single word or a word with hashtag, as well as the number of people talking about that particular topic on Facebook. It says that this is based on the number of original posts that mention the topic and shares of posts about the topic.
Facebook says that the list of topics you see is still personalized based on a number of factors, including Pages you’ve liked, your location, the previous trending topics with which you’ve interacted, and what is trending across Facebook overall.
Regarding the new move, Facebook in a statement, said:
Our goal is to enable Trending for as many people as possible, which would be hard to do if we relied solely on summarizing topics by hand. A more algorithmically driven process allows us to scale Trending to cover more topics and make it available to more people globally over time. This is something we always hoped to do but we are making these changes sooner given the feedback we got from the Facebook community earlier this year.