• Facebook Marketplace in the app has some new functionality.
• Backing out of an advert will prompt users to “show more” or “show less”.
• This doesn’t appear to be in the desktop version right now.

Facebook Marketplace, the classified / secondhand sales subsite of the popular social media platform, has received a small change in functionality recently that may improve your experiences with it.

This change is a small message which appears after you view an advert, and return to the main search screen of Marketplace.

After you’ve done this the main image will show two buttons appearing over it to show more, or show less, as you can see in the header image above.

Tapping on either should affect what you will see in the future.

What’s odd is the fact that these messages don’t appear after every advert and are actually quite rare. It seems then that Facebook has implemented this as more of a “check up” feature to make sure you’re still seeing posts that you’re interested in.

Those who have been using Marketplace on the Facebook app for a while will know that it has, in the past, interrupted browsing sessions to ask you to rate five or so adverts to see if you want to continue being shown similar listings.

It seems the show more and show less buttons are simply an extension of this system and a way for Facebook to make direct changes to browsing based on your feedback instead of simply guessing from your use of the app.

We’ve been using both the old style of providing this feedback and the two new buttons and we’re not yet sold on just how much of our input the system is using. For example we once helped a relative look at adverts for car parts and now these still appear in our searches months later despite continually hiding these posts and asking not to see them again.

Finally, if you use Marketplace and these new buttons haven’t appeared, you’re not doing anything wrong. It seems that, here in the office, only one of us on the editorial team have seen these appear.

Facebook and other social media platforms continually test out features like this on a small number of users so this may simply be another example of that.