Facebook is changing its News Feed yet again, and this time it's looking to make it more informative.

The social network is adding a new "ranking signal" that will help surface the most informative stories that would've already appeared in your Feed, just not in as prominent a view.

Here's how the algorithm works: Members of the company's Feed Quality Program rank stories on a scale of one to five, one being "really not informative" and five being "really informative." Participants who rank a story highly are also asked to explain why they enjoyed seeing that particular story.

This data is then used to create a ranking signal, which is just one of the many signals used by Facebook to determine how relevant something is to you, based on your interests and habits.

The results are, hopefully, posts that you find personally informative. This will likely change over time, Facebook notes in a blog post, and means you'll see content in your News Feed that won't necessarily show up in the Feeds of people of you know.

Human touch

The Feed Quality Program is particularly intriguing for those who've never heard about it before. It basically consists of "tens of thousands" of surveys crowd-sourced daily as well as more involved participants who are paid for their efforts.

Together, they'll determine what makes a story informative, though Facebook will rely on things like your own interests, relation to the whomever posted the story and what content you typically engage with to ultimately surface stories you see.

The new ranking signal comes just a week after Facebook tweaked its News Feed to bury clickbait articles. Facebook updates its News Feed algorithm often, so this won't be the last time you hear about changes coming to what you see on the most popular social network on the planet.

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Don't be surprised to hear the defeated howls of a thousand media people in the air today, as Twitter has just pressed the go button on its controversial shake-up of the Twitter timeline.

Last week, the hashtag #RIPTwitter started trending after rumors emerged that the company would switch so that timelines are not reverse chronological, as they are now, but instead generated by an algorithm. The thinking is that this would make Twitter more like Facebook, where upon visiting you're presented with only the items which the algorithm thinks you'll be most interested in.

The company has now made it official, rolling the feature out to accounts that use the Twitter app.

"We've already seen that people who use this new feature tend to Retweet and Tweet more, creating more live commentary and conversations, which is great for everyone", the company explained in an official blog post.

Opt-in ... for now

That nervous unease that you can see across the #RIPTwitter hashtag is coming from the power users who spend every day on Twitter. People like journalists, who require the real-time functionality in order to properly do their jobs.

So, the good news is that this new approach to the timeline is opt-in, at least initially. To switch the feature on, simply go into the timeline section of your settings and choose "Show me the best Tweets first". Even with the feature turned on, you can pull to refresh your tweets and it will switch back to normal, chronological view.

The launch comes at a difficult time for Twitter, which has been frustrating investors with slow growth and struggling to figure out how to make any money. This has led to executive shake-ups and the promise of new features to tackle some of the platform's biggest issues, like trolling.

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