60 Days of Being Facebook’s Guinea Pig: Exploring the Already Explored
To whom it may concern: Mark has overdone it with the “special Explore Feed” a.k.a. my time spent on platform is nearing the ground. (feedback)
The story begins on October 19, 2017. Just two months before the Christmas, Facebook decided to start a rather cruel test of his Explore Feed feature. The good intention was (apparently) to fight Newsfeed’s “content overload” by simply splitting the content from user’s friends and liked pages into two separate feeds.
The Guinea Pigs? Millions of users in less important markets… Slovakia, Bolivia, Guatemala, Cambodia, Serbia and Sri Lanka.
It didn’t take long to see the damage made. Within day or two, you could see most of the social media marketers bleeding on the ground, crying in the corners, some even swimming in tranquilizers…
You may expect some kind of happy ending to this story, but as we now, in real life it is not always the case. Just 60 days after the change, I can’t see any improvement or benefits. Not for marketers, nor for common users.
Act 1: The Consequences
I don’t want to talk about social media marketing, but I’ll start with it anyway to give you some much-needed context.
What happened: All content of liked/followed pages etc. was moved to the new Explore Feed. It’s literally one-click-away, unfortunately out of chronological order. (Also, don’t forget that people are lazy.)
The main Newsfeed (out of chronological order too) contains any content published or shared by our friends = more food, motivation quotes, silly events (which will never happen), etc. Oh, I forgot — and ads. A lot of ads, because paying to boost the reach of your FB page’s posts is the only way, how to get your page’s content into main Newsfeed. You know, the place where people actually are…
(Note: In other countries where Explore Feed was launched too, it works on different basis — and it actually makes sense. I’ll explain later.)
As a result, the reach and interactions have fallen by tens of %. Local sources pointed on FB’s analytics tool CrowdTangle, which showed average 75% decrease in interactions of 60 Slovak media pages during the first day after the change.
Personally, I’ve seen even worse numbers and effects. Because of certain level of confidentiality of the data, I can’t share more as of yet…
Act 2: Facebook and the Average Joe
Now let’s jump to the most important thing, that Facebook should be concerned of in the first place — regular user’s feedback.
For 2 or 3 weeks before the change, my wife kept complaining about FB app. There was not much new, up-to-date content she could see. To be honest, I didn’t pay attention. But in the moment we officially heard the good old “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature”, I knew what we can expect.
(Disclaimer: Since small part of my job as a journalist and editor is to work with social media channels, I might be little bit biased. Still, I’ll try my best to describe the personal experience during my free-time use.)
Problem №1: Outdated content. Suddenly, I suffered the same way as my wife for weeks. Two months after the change, I see the same stuff in my Newsfeed — all day long.
No matter how many times I visited the site or opened the mobile app, I’m still staring at the same boring joke from my old buddy. At the same ad underneath. At the same follow-up posts of other friends… it literally looks like the Newsfeed’s content is properly updated only once every 24 hrs.
What do you think happens, if I scroll down far enough? Well, I can see the best of posts from previous days… that I’ve already seen, too.
Problem №2: Content quality. My main Newsfeed is now created solely by my friends or 3rd party content they share. Which is — ultimately and unfortunately — just a too much of a good thing.
With so many posts from friends, there is very high percentage of content with low to zero value. Like a lot of wannabe-funny events, inviting you (e.g.) to watch solar eclipse in 2075.
Problem №3: No workaround. People quickly started searching, how to get around these changes. How to see at least something from their favorite sites in Newsfeed. But there isn’t proper solution.
So most of them (including me) are using the “See First” feature to follow the most important stuff — at least in Explore Feed. But that is far from ideal.
Facebook offered a nice way how to find out, what’s happening. But that’s not the case anymore (so, welcome back, here-not-so-popular Twitter). Even stuff in Explore feed is often out of date.
Also, messing up with FB algorithm by artificially changing what it should show you (via See First) isn’t very good thing to do, I suppose.
It even makes the chance that you will miss something important higher. I’ve only few pages with See First preference. But just a quick look at my phone right now shows, that first 15 posts in my Explore Feed is from my See First list. Which means if something important happens, and these personal “top pages” won’t cover it, I’ll most likely miss it.
Problem №4: No place for the poor. Last but not least important thing. Explore feed is one click away, but numbers don’t lie. The reach is much lower.
Therefore the change also really affects NPO’s, trying to help within our communities with no spare money for FB advertising. Tell the poor dog, that his chance to meet new family on FB is now 2/3 lower…
Act 3: Rest of the World: The Winter is Coming (?)
I know, I know. There are always people complaining about major changes. But to me, this time around it’s different — simply because this change makes UX really worse.
The result is, that my wife and I are using Facebook much less in our free time. Because it’s turned into a boring place where it is difficult to find new, interesting and relevant content.
And I’m not alone. Many other people gave the same feedback — either in comments on our website, Facebook itself (hm, that irony), or in person. Some even praised the change, because it helped them fight the FB-addiction.
So, what next? As a journalist, I’m occasionally being asked whether will Facebook roll this version of the feature globally. Personally — I don’t think/hope so. Though it would be really interesting to see the reaction from world’s biggest media houses.
Facebook said at the time, that this test should run for several months, but there are no plans (as of yet?) to roll it out globally. So, my best advice is to keep your fingers crossed…
The last thought: Explore Feed should stay alive. As I already mentioned, outside six countries, there is different version of Explore Feed. It’s the place, where people can search and find interesting stuff from people and pages, which they (so far) don’t like or follow.
That’s what I think Explore Feed should be about. Exploring.
