Facebook Kills Dual-Sourced 'Explore Feed' Test After User Feedback

Facebook is working hard to change how it operates to make the social network a more inviting place for users to connect with friends. Doing this involves bringing the hammer down on fake news and allowing the Facebook masses to determine what news sources they trust. Facebook has announced that one of the things it tried to do make the network better for everyone failed, and has since been killed off.

Facebook's Adam Mosseri wrote, "We constantly try out new features, design changes and ranking updates to understand how we can make Facebook better for everyone. Some of these changes—like Reactions, Live Video, and GIFs— work well and go on to become globally available. Others don’t and we drop them. Today, we’re ending one of those tests: the Explore Feed."

Facebook says that the Explore Feed was a response to the consistent complaints of people who said they wanted to see more friends and family in the News Feed. Facebook tried to make two different News Feeds, with one for friends and family and the other for posts from Pages. The testing began in October 2017 and was run in six countries.

Mosseri wrote, "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."

Facebook thinks that the changes it has made more recently will address the issues with the News Feed better than the Explore Feed. Among those changes were a News Feed prioritizing "meaningful social interactions" and fewer posts from businesses, brands, and media. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has also promised more local news in your feed rather than national stories. Facebook notes that feedback from test countries indicated that dual feeds made it harder for people to access important information.

"Separately, we’re also discontinuing the Explore Feed bookmark globally this week. Explore gave people a new feed of content to discover Pages and public figures they hadn’t previously followed. We concluded that Explore isn’t an effective way for people to discover new content on Facebook," wrote Mosseri.