From the archive. First published in January 2016. Rewritten for clarity, with a note on what happened afterwards.
In 2016 Facebook tested splitting the feed into topic tabs, so posts from friends and pages could be browsed by category rather than arriving in one long stream. It did not ship in that form.
The idea kept coming back, and tracking it tells you something useful about what Facebook actually wants.
The attempts
- 2016. Topic tabs tested and dropped.
- 2017 to 2018. The Explore Feed, a separate feed for pages. In six countries it replaced page content in the main feed entirely, and page reach there collapsed. Shut down in March 2018.
- 2023 onwards. A Feeds tab offering a chronological option alongside the ranked feed, which exists today and which almost nobody uses.
What the pattern reveals
Facebook has repeatedly wanted to separate content people choose from content it chooses for them. Every time it builds a space people must opt into, they do not opt in. The default feed is the product, and anything moved out of it effectively disappears.
What finally worked was the opposite approach: keep one feed and change its composition, increasing the proportion of AI recommended content from accounts people do not follow to around 30 percent by 2024.
What it means if you own a page
Your page’s value is a position in the default feed. Not in a tab, not in a section, not in whatever secondary surface is being tested this year. If a change moves page content out of the main feed, that is existential rather than inconvenient, and it has nearly happened at least once.
The flip side is the current arrangement, where recommendation means your content can reach people who have never heard of you. That is a better deal than any tabbed design would have been.
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