Facebook doubles down on algorithms in the main feed

Image: Meta

The News Feed is going to be split into two parts. There are two new feeds that will be found in the app. Home is the new name for the tab you see when you first open the app and is designed for discovery with personalized content. There is a new Feeds tab, which contains recent posts from friends, groups, Facebook Pages, and favorites, with no suggestions for you.

The two tabs will be accessible from both the app on the phone and the one on the computer. The contents of this bar are designed to change based on which tabs users spend the most time in, but tabs can be pinned to make sure their positions don't change. Over the next week, the company expects the updates to be rolled out around the world.

Image: Meta

One of the most requested features for Facebook is to make sure people don't miss a friend's post. The Feeds tab will show posts from your friends, groups, Pages and more in chronological order. On the Home tab, the app will open with a personalized feed, where our discovery engine will recommend the best content to you. The Feeds tab will allow you to modify your experience further.

Splitting the feed seems to be an attempt to balance Meta's desire for Facebook to become more like TikTok, which recommends content from across its platform based on what it thinks you might be interested in, and its historical approach of focusing on the accounts and pages that people Meta says that the Home feed is going to become more of a discovery engine going forward, and that making it the default shows where their priorities are.

The Home tab will still show posts from friends and family, but they will be surrounded by recommendations made by a machine learning ranking system. The Feed tab has ads in it. There will be some overlap between the two.

The move shows how much the News Feed has changed over the years, as it has had to respond to emerging trends. TikTok is the biggest threat in the year 2022. Meta tried to more or less clone the social media platform with Lasso shut down after just 18 months, and the company now focuses on the popularity of the short-form video format.

The danger from TikTok is still present. Although the platform grew in the first quarter of this year, it lost daily users for the first time in the last quarter of 2021. With today's changes, Facebook is paving the way for its embrace of algorithmic recommended feeds.