Facebook is now moving to match bulletin-board systems of yore by offering a news feed that stays fixed in chronological order and does not interrupt the flow with suggested posts.
The new Feeds tab will arrive over the next few days to the mobile apps and web interfaces of Meta’s primary social network, where it will appear as a thumbnail of a screen overlaid with a clock. It dispenses with Facebook’s sometimes-erratic sorting algorithm to show posts from friends and groups as well as pages you follow in old-school chronological order.
Unlike Facebook’s News Feed today—which can be set to show posts in chronological order but reverts soon enough—Feeds also won’t show any “Suggested For You” posts. It will also allow you to filter what you see by friends, pages, groups or up to 30 Favorites you can designate among those categories.
But ads remain in this view; a social network that reported 1.96 billion daily active users in its most recent quarter costs real money to run.
This new, simplified interface addresses a near-constant complaint among Facebook users. As CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a post announcing the feature, "One of the most requested features for Facebook is to make sure people don't miss friends' posts."
Offering a non-ranked view that doesn’t reflect any personal profiling will also bring Facebook into compliance with a key provision of the European Union’s upcoming Digital Services Act.
Feeds will not, however, be the screen that greets Facebook users when they open its apps and sites. They will still open to a home screen, now called just Home, that does feature an algorithmically sorted list of updates as well as Facebook’s suggestions of what you might like, such as People You May Know listings. The company’s announcement hints that Home will rely more on those suggestions than its current default view.
“Your Home tab is uniquely personalized to you through our machine learning ranking system. This system takes into account thousands of signals to help cut through the clutter and rank content in the order we think you will find most valuable. We're investing in AI to best serve recommended content in this ranked experience.”
Meta spokeswoman Mari Melguizo says this interface revamp will also allow users to change out the tabs shown in Facebook’s shortcut bar. So if TikTok-esque Reels video clips have no appeal to you, you can remove the shortcut for them and replace it with a shortcut to another Facebook feature. It will not, however, let you scrub those features from the Home view.
In March, Meta offered a chronological “Following” display option for Instagram. And last April, it touted “More Control and Context” for the News Feed, including the short-term option to display it in chronological order. But on my devices, that somehow retreated most of the way down a “See More” submenu.