Slickrock – Rating Personalized Recommended Stories

Welcome to this informational review of the Slickrock which is a project that focuses on Facebook Stories and rating these personalized recommended stories. 

Stories are defined as temporary content that is created by a page or a user. Stories on Facebook automatically disappear after 24 hours and can only be viewed during this time and it disappears after this. The important thing to know is that a story can have several pieces of content and include multiple photos and videos. 

Stories can be found in the ‘Stories Tray’ which is located at the top of the newsfeed for those who are not familiar with how to view them and what you’ll be looking at if you decide to try for a job as a rater in this project. 

The reason that human data collection is needed for the Stories Recommendations product is so that some users will see stories from people they don’t follow, but may be interesting and enjoyable. 

Feedback from raters is used to determine whether stories that are recommended to some users are actually relevant to them. Each rater is given a set of personalized recommended stories that Facebook thinks will be interesting to the user. You would then rate the relevance on each story for that particular user. 

Fecebook Rating Tool and the rating process

There is an online user interface that each rater logs into that is provided by Workplace by Facebook so the tools are directly made by them. You simply log into the system and then choose either Assign 20 jobs or Just Go which will do the same thing and give you random stories to rate. These will give YOU stories to rate as how you feel about them. More on that later…

 Once you are logged in this is what you would see when you begin rating:

When you see a story that has multiple pieces of content, you will need to answer some questions based on what you see in the stories. 

So now you have you a sneak peek at what the interface looks like, we’ll tell you a little about how you would rate recommended stories. As we said previously, these are stories that are presented to you that are likely based on your likes and preferences including your interactions on Facebook. The goal of the project is to help FB understand as best as possible how you felt about each individual story that was recommended to you. 

You need to ask yourself the following questions:

Question 1: Did the recommended story make you feel uncomfortable or was it unacceptable? Some of those could be from these examples below:

Nudity/partial nudity
Violence
Political views
Religion
Feeling spammy or inauthentic like an ad
Being in a language that you are not familiar with

In these instances you would click the ‘Yes’ option and then explain in your own words why the content made you feel the way it did. 

There will come a time when you will see stories that are based on public figures and you will be asked how familiar you are with them and asked if you recognize them in the thumbnail or the story itself. There are different levels of familiarity which range from Very Familiar where you know a public figure reasonably well such as a performer like Lady Gaga, or someone else equally popular, and you are interested in them and their activities. 

Mildly Familiar is when you have heard of the person but are not deeply into their activities or what they do such as knowing the name of a sports player like Lebron James but not knowing what sport they play. 

And at last there is the Not Familiar and you have no idea who the public figure is and you have never seen them before. 

Therefore, knowing these you would select one of these three options depending on how well you know the public figure. 

The third question asks if the author of this recommended story is from your area of interest. It is perfectly fine if you don’t know the person as long as they fall under your areas of interest. If you do not recognize the author, then you would go to their page and look to see if what they are about is relevant to you or not. If the author falls under your area of interest, then you select YES, but if not then NO.

The fourth question wants to know if the content of the story is interesting to you or not. Don’t forget that a story can contain more than one piece of content or video. It is VERY important to understand that you need to define the content interesting to you even if there is ONLY ONE piece of content in the recommended story. If just ONE story is interesting to you then you would mark yes. However, if none of the recommended stories interest you, then you should select no, and then you need to explain in your own words why none of the stories caught your interest. It is important to explain as simply as possible, and give as much useful information as possible and not answers like ‘I just didn’t like it.’. There is an option to Skip or Reroute but these should never be used unless there is a problem with the content not rendering. 

Once you are done answering all four questions, you would then click on ‘Submit Decision’ which will then take you to the next story. Each session to rate is 30 minutes long. 

If you are working on this project, we’d like to hear from you in the comments. If you have any questions on this project, or if you need help passing any exams related to getting any jobs we have listed here, leave a comment or email me and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible!