Facebook’s making changes so you don’t see all your friends’ spammy app posts

You know who they are. The Facebook ‘friends’ who haven’t given much thought to their share settings and consequently tell you exactly which songs they were listening to on Spotify, what they’ve been up to in Candy Crush Saga and how far they ran with Endomondo last week. While it’s sometimes fun to creep observe what they’re doing with their lives, chances are you would also like to cut out some of the clutter.

Well, Facebook’s latest changes will make automatic app posting less of a problem. The social media giant announced that it will be giving its users more control over what they share by cutting down on the posts apps make to their profiles without their consent. The key differentiator here is whether the post is ‘implicit’ (automatic) or ‘explicit’ (specifically approved and shared by the user). As the company explained in a blog post to developers:

Over the past year, the number of implicitly shared stories in News Feed has naturally declined. This decline is correlated with how often people mark app posts as spam, which dropped by 75% over the same period. In the coming months, we will continue to prioritize explicitly shared stories from apps in News Feed and Ticker over implicitly shared stories.

It’s up to developers to adjust how their apps post to Facebook, unless they want their implicit updates to get filtered way down in the News Feed. For example, if you hadn’t turned off the setting, Instagram used to share an update on every post you ‘liked’ on its app to your Facebook account, without requiring the go-ahead from you first. It’s now switched to explicit updates.

The reduction in spammy posts from your friends apps is, of course, designed to make your Facebook experience less annoying, and keep you coming back to check your News Feed. Facebook says that it has found that explicitly shared stories typically get more engagement from the user’s friends and are more generally interesting than the implicitly shared ones… and it definitely doesn’t want you to get bored on its site. Although, if you’re friends with people who happily (and explicitly) share app updates, you’ll still be seeing a lot of those in your feed.

The changes are the most recent Facebook has made to how it managed third party apps recently. It also changed its login mechanism to allow users to log in anonymously using Facebook, and have more control over what personal information they share with apps.