‘Congrats’ in order for Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook’s News Feed has always been a mystery. Some posts show up in the feed, some don’t. The feed has become over run with all sorts of content and Facebook uses an algorithm to manage it. No algorithm is perfect. CEO Mark Zuckerberg found this out when the top story in his feed was a co-worker’s birthday. At the same time, his niece had been born.

According to a new Steven Levy story in Wired, when Zuckerberg saw his co-worker’s birthday ranking ahead of his niece’s birth, he asked for a tweak to Facebook’s News Feed algorithm. The tweak was that if the word “congratulations” is in the comments, a post gets a boost. This makes sense — congratulations is the #1 thing people say in response to events like a graduation, a new baby, or a new job — exactly the kind of stuff that Facebook wants to surface.

Zuckerberg tells Levy, “We use quantitative metrics that measure likes and comments and clicks and shares but we also have qualitative systems so that people can reorder a feed to tell us what they thought were the most important things.”