Facebook wants to know why you hid that photo from your News Feed

The much-requested dislike button may never end up coming to Facebook but you can still show your lack of interest or plain annoyance by hiding stories like status updates, photos and links from people you’re friends with, those you follow or pages you have liked. While Facebook has allowed you to customise your News Feed, ABC News reports that Facebook will now try and learn why you dislike seeing some stories.

You will now be able to tell Facebook why you hid that story

"Over the next few months what you will see from us is more on why people like and don't like certain things in their feed," Facebook's Product Manager for Ads Fidji Simo said. "We are planning to refine those so users can tell us exactly the reasons they are hiding that piece of content." While Simo did not elaborate on how Facebook plans to implement such a feature, she said that the social networking giant will be testing new menus and options over the next three or four months. This, she explained, will let users inform Facebook easily whether the News Feed item they hid was offensive, inappropriate or just plain uninteresting. "If a lot of people start reporting that something is offensive, it's something we would probably not show to a lot more users," she said. "If you tell us that something is uninteresting we would show you less about that, but we wouldn't use that signal with other users."

Meanwhile, it has been noted that the social networking website has been conducting yet another small experiment with its pages. TThis small but significant test saw a pop-up appearing for some users after liking a page. This pop-up lets you select whether you want to get notifications regarding updates from that page on your News Feed. While Facebook has confirmed that it is no longer running this feature test, it would be a boon for page owners on Facebook if the company decided to bring it back in one form or the other.

An option to get notifications from pages? Yes please! (Image credit: Inside Facebook)

Page owners have been facing a predicament as over the many changes Facebook has made to its News Feed in the past has caused updates from pages to not appear on the Home page for users. The problem gets worse if the user has liked a large amount of pages. While you can still choose to activate notifications from a page, it requires going through a couple of menus and a tidy amount of clicks to find the option. Hopefully, for page owners, Facebook will make this seemingly easier option available soon.