Photo credit: https://betanews.com/2018/03/02/facebook-kills-explore-feed/ (Betanews)
In Brief
A pattern has recently emerged where the world's largest social networking platforms decide to suddenly launch an experiment that they deem to be brilliant, only to watch the subsequent demise of their misguided lab work. I allude to both Snapchat and Facebook in this instance, but today's article focuses upon the latter. Recently, Facebook has concluded to withdraw an element of its news feed labeled "Explore". According to Facebook head of news, Adam Mosseri, the purpose of this alternate news feed was the following:
"The Explore Feed was a trial response to consistent feedback we received from people over the past year who said they want to see more from friends and family in News Feed. The idea was to create a version of Facebook with two different News Feeds: one as a dedicated place with posts from friends and family and another as a dedicated place for posts from Pages."
Explore Feed – characterized by a rocket ship icon – was introduced this past October, and was launched in six countries: Bolivia, Cambodia, Guatemala, Serbia, Slovakia and Sri Lanka. Just a few months into this trial run, and Facebook's split news feed began to display symptoms of failure, ultimately watching its spaceship crash-land into the world of reality. On the topic of the company pulling the plug on this operation, Mosseri stated that, “You gave us our answer: People don’t want two separate feeds. In surveys, people told us they were less satisfied with the posts they were seeing, and having two separate feeds didn’t actually help them connect more with friends and family.”
A More Detailed Look Into Explore Feed
Explore Feed's purpose was to enable Facebook users to discover information on the network that was not solely bounded by whom the users followed. Explore would instead deliver interesting content to users from pages not followed by users – like news outlets. Of course, Facebook's launch of explore feed came with an ulterior motive: monetization. The company hoped that explore would increase the amount of time that users spent on the network, thus enabling Facebook to display more ads.
Photo credit: https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/01/facebook-ends-its-experiment-with-the-alternative-explore-news-feed/ (TechCrunch)
Explore Feed And Disgruntled Journalists
Facebook's launch of Explore triggered journalists and media companies to express immense dissatisfaction and alarm over the news feed feature. Journalist and editorial member at Guatemalan news site Soy502, Dina Fernandez, told the Guardian:
“The Facebook explore tab killed 66 percent of our traffic. Just destroyed it … years of really hard work were just swept away. It has been catastrophic, and I am very, very worried.”
Thanks to Facebook's decision to terminate Explore, Fernandez – along with a mass of other journalists – can enjoy a breath of relief.
An Interesting Parallel: Snapchat's Recent Update and FB's Explore Feed
Back in February, I wrote an article regarding the release of Snapchat's new update, which ended up harming the app more than helping. What I find interesting is that Snapchat users were outraged over the change from two separate feeds to just one feed, whereas the discontent surrounding Facebook's Explore Feed had to do with converting the news feed into two distinct pages. Perhaps these two social media giants can learn from each other's update failures in order to avoid future dilemmas.