Facebook Ends Secondary Explore Feed Experiment

Facebook has announced that it’s ending its test for its experimental Explore Feed, which exclusively showed users content from Pages they’ve liked in six countries. Facebook says that it ended the experiment due to user response.

“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,” Facebook’s Head of News Feed Adam Mosseri said.

“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.”

Mosseri also said that Facebook received negative feedback from users in the test countries. Apparently, the Explore Feed made it more difficult for people to access important information. Facebook says that it will act on this feedback by updating how it determines where it tests new products and features. Facebook will also be discontinuing the Explore Feed bookmark feature worldwide.

“Explore gave people a new feed of content to discover Pages and public figures they hadn’t previously followed,” Mosseri said. “We concluded that Explore isn’t an effective way for people to discover new content on Facebook.”

The Facebook Explore Feed was first made available back in October 2017. It was first made available on its mobile app and was later rolled out to the desktop site. It only showed content from Pages they’ve liked and other posts that may be very similar to other content that the user has liked previously from the regular News Feed. It was also able to show content that’s popular among the user’s circle of friends.

Back in January, Facebook announced that its News Feed algorithms will prioritize posts from friends and family to help give users more “meaningful interactions.” Facebook now says that this recent change to the News Feed will be able to better address users’ request to see more posts that they actually want to see. This also means that users will see less public content like posts from businesses, brands and media, including videos and other posts from Pages that they’ve liked.