Facebook dropping chronological order for notifications and prioritising the ones it thinks people want to see

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Facebook has made a major change to notifications.

The social network is going to start ordering some of them by “relevance”, rather than chronologically.

Facebook will decide which of your notifications are most important or interesting to you, according to an alert seen by the Independent.

Notifications are also being split into separate sections: New and Earlier.

The news was delivered earlier today, by a notification reading: “Your new notifications are now sorted to help you see what’s most important to you.”

Tapping the alert takes you to a separate page in Facebook’s Help Centre.

“You can find your notifications from Facebook by tapping [the Notifications symbol],” the page reads. “You may notice that this tab is separated into a few sections:

“New: Recent notifications you may not have seen yet. These notifications are listed by how relevant we think they are to you, so they may appear to be out of order.

“Earlier: Notifications that you’ve already seen, ordered by when they came in. If you don’t have any recent notifications, all your notifications may be under Earlier.”

Facebook for iOS and the desktop are also receiving the same treatment.

It’s an unexpected move from Facebook, which is likely to split opinion.

While some notifications can get lost as fresh ones come in, they’re supposed to be simple to use.

How exactly the social network plans to go about ranking each user’s notifications by relevancy isn’t yet clear. If it does this badly, one of Facebook’s key features could be ruined.

The move away from chronological ordering could cause a backlash too. There was widespread outrage when the previously chronological Instagram turned into one that is ordered by “relevancy”.

We’ve asked Facebook to explain how it will decide which notifications get pushed to the top, and to clarify whether the new split arrangement is a test feature or officially coming to all users.