Move over, humans: The machines are taking over, at least when it comes to populating Facebook?s Trending feature.
The social network announced in a Newsroom post Friday that descriptions for Trending topics are being eliminated, removing the burden of writing descriptions for those Trending topics from its employees.
Users will now see a list of Trending topics, and hovering over them or clicking on them will bring users to content on those topics.
Humans are not out of the picture altogether, as Facebook wrote in the Newsroom post:
There are still people involved in this process to ensure that the topics that appear in Trending remain high-quality–for example, confirming that a topic is tied to a current news event in the real world. The topic #lunch is talked about during lunchtime every day around the world, but it will not be a trending topic. These changes mean that we no longer need to do things like write topic descriptions and short story summaries, since we?re relying on an algorithm to pull excerpts directly from news stories. Our team will still strictly follow our guidelines, which have been updated to reflect these changes. The social network also provided more details on why it decided to make this change:
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 ...