Scrolling through my Facebook feed feels like watching TV

Disclaimer: This post explains the reasons behind Tree, a social network focused on content sharing and curation. I am one of the co-founders.

I got on Facebook at the same time as most Europeans, circa 2008.
Facebook was great for 2 years, until it started eating away my free time, and I needed to study… big time.

I deleted my account, focused on my studies and only joined again 2 years later, after a discussion with two of my friends. They had straight up told me: “in Hungary, we call someone who doesn’t have Facebook a ghost”.

I had been glad to be a “ghost” during my years of classes préparatoires (highly intensive engineering prep-school in France) because I needed to avoid any kind of disturbance. I was however on the verge of entering an engineering school which meant that I was going to (need to) socialise.

I created a new Facebook account in 2012 and started using it to its full potential: I was meeting people, going to events and discovering great content, because I didn’t have many friends and because Facebook wasn’t processing as much information back then: my feed was clean and relevant.

Gradually it changed: I friended more people, liked more pages, went to more events and it all built up: I was getting notifications from everywhere and anywhere.

The clean-up

I unfriended people, created lists, “unliked” pages and my newsfeed got better… but it didn’t last long, because Facebook gradually introduced me with more content — a lot of it.

I used to read the articles, videos, and music from my friends — I loved seeing content on my newsfeed. This time it wasn’t exactly shared by my friends anymore: “X liked this fan page”, “Y commented on a stranger’s post”.

Add the sponsored content and Facebook now felt like watching TV.

Scrolling through my feed like I switched TV channels

I used to watch TV as a kid, scouring channels for something interesting, navigating between bland shows and commercials.

I had soon realised that I didn’t want to be fed with random content, I wanted to be in control and the Internet had been my saviour for this very reason.

Facebook was now replicating what had made TV so powerful: I would see something interesting on my feed, interact with it, then scroll over irrelevant or uninteresting content yet keep scrolling for fear of missing out. And be exposed to ads in the process.

A collective effort to find great content

What I used to love about Facebook — sharing among my friends was dead. Interacting with them was not possible anymore: the spot had long been taken by content that Facebook judged more interesting for my friends to see.

I always favour an article recommended by a friend or colleague over an algorithm because they vouch for it and it also fosters conversations: a collective effort to find great content.

I basically had 3 choices:

• Unfollow / unfriend everyone and get a clean feed of news outlets, fan pages and public people: people I had no connections to whatsoever.
• Keep my friends in my feed and be flooded with content remotely relevant.
• Look for alternatives, i.e social networks that just do content-sharing, and do it well.

From Facebook to Tree: yet another social network?

Over the course of a year I looked for alternatives and realised that while content-sharing had disappeared on Facebook, no one had tried to fill the gap.

I initially thought that I was alone but over time I stumbled upon so many people both online and offline who shared the same problem that I decided to take the matter into my own hands.

One of these people was Antoine, my friend and incidentally a Computer Science major. We knew that the work awaiting us was going to be massive but we also knew that we could spend our last year of masters abroad. The work-load wouldn’t be as intensive and we would benefit from state and regional fundings to bootstrap our idea. We moved to Estonia to launch Tree.

Tree: a social network focused on content sharing and curation

In drafting the idea of Tree, we identified three major problems regarding content sharing on Facebook:

• Information flow: the lack of interesting content has never been an issue, it’s the speed at which content is created that forces us to make compromises - I often see great articles that I don’t have the time to read right now.
• Information overload: at some point, there is too much information to be displayed on a single feed - it’s also hard to make sense out of it, no matter the algorithm working under the hood.
• Relevance: people have different centres of interest - being their friends doesn’t mean that we like everything they share.
  Studying to become a materials engineer, I was also beginning to notice how my exact interests were drifting away from those of my friends.

Tree solves exactly these pain points, that’s it.

• Information flow: on Tree every post has a save button that saves the article, video or song for later. The browser extensions let you instantly find and review all of your saved content.
• Information overload: there are 20 different topic-based feeds on Tree (technology, business, music…). As each topic has its own feed, the amount of content displayed is logically divided by 20; it is also organised from the get-go.
• Relevance: on Tree you get to choose what you want to see and you don’t bug anyone when you share something specific. We don’t all like the same things and it’s completely fine.

A growing Tree

Tree is still in its infancy. The small community gives away the fact that we just launched. But it’s already working: every day our users surface great content we wouldn’t have seen otherwise.

Tree is a niche service in a world plagued with an ever-decreasing attention span; it caters to curious people who want to expand their knowledge.

If you relate to this blog post, we’ve been waiting for you - you can sign-up.