Facebook has readjusted the notification and invite allocations for applications. According to the platform status feed, last night Facebook made it so that applications that are rated higher and are less spammy will receive more notifications and those that are ranked lower will receive less. Here’s what Facebook wrote:

The allocation buckets and thresholds have been tweaked tonight for requests and notifications. As we’ve improved the algorithm, we would like allocations to be more widely distributed to more greatly reward uses of communication channels that users respond to favorably.

Notifications now have more buckets for greater granularity and a broader distribution of thresholds, so applications in higher buckets should receive larger allocations that before and lower buckets should receive smaller allocations. Requests still has the same number of buckets, but the distribution has also been pushed wider, resulting in more requests for some applications and fewer requests for other applications.

This is a pretty standard process of rewarding systems to force the cream of the crop to rise to the top. I’ve been wondering myself if Facebook would eventually start removing inactive applications and more spammy applications from the application directory. In my own opinion this would provide for a better user experience given that navigating 22,000 applications is not very feasible.

Do you think Facebook should start removing spammy applications from the platform? What changes do you think should be made?