Facebook needs to kill the News Feed
2025-04-26 22:46:37
What is the Facebook News Feed for?
In 2018, the answer is less certain than ever. Mark Zuckerberg now says it should be "good for people," like kale, polio vaccines, or any number of things that aren't data-harvesting, Russian propaganda-boosting social networks.
SEE ALSO: I deleted Facebook off my phone and you should tooAnd so, Facebook will alter your feed to favor content posted by friends and family — particularly if it's generating a lot of comments — while minimizing stuff from brands. Everyone's spent a lot of time parsing what this algorithm shift means, but here's an educated guess: Not much!
Facebook has announced very similar changes before (in 2015 and 2016). Ultimately, fiddling with the News Feed results in nothing more than a fiddled-with News Feed, not something fundamentally different and better.
Zuckerberg wants "meaningful" interactions to occur on Facebook's most important real estate: the unending feed you encounter the moment you open your app or navigate to Facebook.com. This would have been a nice thought 11 years ago, before everyone had too many bad Facebook friends and "liked" so many pages.
The social network has promised yet another update to its product, but it hasn't acknowledged the very real possibility that the product itself is fundamentally broken — that the News Feed should be dissolved and replaced with something else.
It surfaces bogus information, it's filled with trashy videos from viral content factories with names like "90s KIDZ☆ ONLY," and it rewards irritating political opinions from your distant relatives and high school acquaintances. Turning the volume up on comments and down on posts from media outlets isn't going to fix any of this.
Besides, even if you absolutely hate seeing publications in your News Feed, they're not disappearing. Facebook will continue to rank them along with every other bit of content in your News Feed — though you may have to scroll further to see any.
You'll still see news from media outlets in your News Feed, but there will probably be less of it — or, you'll have to scroll deeper to find it. Credit: CHRISTOPHER MINESES/MASHABLE Here's the major issue Facebook is dancing around: The News Feed isn't designed to be social. Maybe it was in 2006, when Facebook launched the very first version of the News Feed as a chronological list of recently-posted content or actions from your friends.
"It updates a personalized list of news stories throughout the day, so you'll know when Mark adds Britney Spears to his Favorites or when your crush is single again," Ruchi Sanghvi, a News Feed product manager, wrote at the time.
But five years later, the product evolved into something very different. The News Feed as we know it now really dates back to 2011, when the feature was infused with content-sorting algorithms that attempt to show you posts that you'll find relevant.
Then, News Feed was described as "your own personal newspaper."
"You won’t have to worry about missing important stuff," Facebook's Mark Tonkelowitz wrote. "All your news will be in a single stream with the most interesting stories featured at the top."
The Facebook News Feed circa 2006, when posts were sorted chronologically rather than by an algorithm. Credit: This 2011 update is the blueprint for the modern News Feed. It's a sorting tool, not a social one.
Yes, people post and comment on material published on the social network, but a more common use, according to at least one study (if not your lived experience), is to "passively" scroll through the News Feed. In that way, Facebook isn't really "social" at all: It's an individual act of content consumption. It's a newsreader.
There's so much content on Facebook that a chronological feed isn't viable for consumers, so News Feed needs to rank it. But a sorting tool doesn't create content or erase it. If you don't like what you're seeing on your News Feed right now, chances are you won't love what's coming.
Facebook may routinely shove against the notion that it's a media company, but a lot of the content that needs to be sorted on its platform is traditional media: Video, photographs, articles. Personal material is mixed in (and will be ranked highly moving forward), creating a content soup without an obvious purpose.
Let's take a snapshot of my feed right now:
First post: A woman who was a year behind me in high school, whom I haven't talked to or consciously thought about in at least 11 years, is giving birth and wants to sell her Bulls tickets.
Second: An ad for Bonobos.
Third: A friend announces a promotion! Although, he first tweeted about it nine days ago.
Fourth: Two friends of mine shared a CNN video, with heartfelt and positive comments.
Fifth: A relative shared a video from NowThis Politics. Her only comment was a crying emoji 😢, though a quick "conversation" ending in a #MAGA hashtag happened beneath.
This is a mess, but it's the kind of mess Facebook likes: All of it, except the ad, was generated by actual people. Some of it was re-shared from publishers, but most of it had a personal flavor regardless and a lot of precious engagement (and comments!) from other users.
The major problem — and the one Facebook says it's trying to fix through algorithm tweaks — is that none of it feels meaningful or compels personal interaction from me, the consumer. You could call this a "me" problem, except it must be typical: So many of us are connected to people we don't know all that well on Facebook that to engage on a personal basis is uncomfortable at best.
One possible outcome of the algorithm tweak is that you'll see more conversations you don't want to be an active part of, which, depending on your perspective, isn't much better than seeing articles you may or may not want to click on.
The much larger issue here is thatFacebook is so damn big, and old, that its News Feed can't possibly work for everyone. While it's championing "meaningful" personal interactions now, there's a good chance that you're more likely to have those on iMessage, Snapchat, Instagram Stories, or, bless 'em, Twitter DMs. Or maybe you're having them on Facebook Messenger! Or in Facebook Groups, which the social network has started to promote and already serve a number of substantial communities.
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In a sense, Facebook already has solutions to the "good for people" quandary: other Facebook products! The News Feed, a hyper-crowded politicized zone with years of baggage, cannot be the place for meaningful interactions now. It's noisy, it's overcrowded, and an algorithm change won't save it — it's fundamentally been this way for years.
If Facebook wants meaningful interactions in this main part of the app, it needs to burn the sucker down and start anew.
