Publishers, more power and insights to you. After a tumultuous day, where many among us felt expunged to the dark corners of News Feed, Facebook is now backtracking, but also giving us a bit more insight on how things work.

Facebook has just released a new guide and a video, featuring Adam, who takes “care of Facebook’s News Feed” – in what capacity still unknown, and gives a brief, concise, although a bit basic explanation of how News Feed works.

In the video, viewers may find out how News Feed ranking works, an abstract algorithm, which takes into consideration the “ingredients” of a post, what users like, the time of the day, along with past activity, likes and engagements on the platform.

To break things down even more, News Feed is a mix of the following steps: Inventory, which is what type of posts are available from friends and publishers and have not been seen yet by the user in question. Then, we have Signals, which is a mix of various indices, such as who created a story, or the time of the day or even how fast is the internet connection at a specific moment. Signals are then combined with feedback from the community. This feedback can come in the form of likes, shares, comments or even reports for spam and post hides. It really is a complex system.

Last but not least, the third step is called Predictions. This is the calculated probability of the way users may react to a story they see on their Newsfeed. Will they report it? Will they like it. This is all an incremental procedure and it’s at best a probability. Of course, with the abundance of data Facebook currently has it is well-placed to make bullseye selections for users’ NewsFeed around the globe. However, sometimes, it fails.

This is the second installment in its informative series, having released the first one, Publishing Principles, back in May.