Facebook: WTF is a trending article and why is it in my news feed?

Zuckerberg and his sneaky little Facebook team have added another new addition to the news feed called ‘Trending Articles’, but what exactly IS a trending article and most importantly why is it RIGHT THERE with no option to get rid of it?

Earlier in the month Mashable reported that a number of users were noticing a huge chunk of their News Feed had been taken up by a Trending Articles box, featuring a range of articles from the apps of big organisations and publications, like The Huffington Post.

Now it seems that the Trending Articles box has been reduced quite noticeably so it’s less offensive to our eyes, but it’s been rolled out to even more users over the past week.

A spokesperson from Facebook told Mashable why the feature had been introduced:

“To help people discover the articles that are most popular among their friends who use social news timeline apps, we’re currently testing new ways of displaying these articles in News Feed.”

However, the main problem is that it isn’t sharing the most popular articles that your network has been reading, but only those with apps, which seems a little limiting for publishers who don’t have an app and users who believe they’re getting a snapshot of what’s actually the most popular content. And that’s REALLY not what Trending Articles seems to be at the moment. We’ve also noticed that only one of our friends has read each of the four supposedly ‘trending’ articles, THAT’S NOT WHAT TRENDING MEANS ZUCKERBERG.

From what we can tell Trending Articles is still being tested among a select few users, so we hope it gets better over the next few weeks. Or we at least hope we get an option to remove it from our screens because right now it’s pretty useless.