This is Facebook's plan to be cool again
Facebook was once, believe it or not, cool.
But a lot has changed since the early days of News Feed, when it was full of status updates and photos from friends. Facebook has gotten crowded with brands and pages vying for eyeballs. It has become a place where people, especially teenagers and young adults, don’t feel as comfortable sharing their lives.
Now, after spending the past four years trying to fix the News Feed by making it more about friends and family, Facebook is going in the other direction: toward showing you more entertaining content from people you don’t know. This new “Discovery Engine” push is all about becoming more like TikTok, which has captured the attention of the young generation Facebook so desperately wants to win back.
The result is an “updated vision for how the Facebook app is going to respond to the next generation of people who are going to use it,” says Tom Alison, the head of the Facebook app at Meta, in what marks his first in-depth podcast interview since he assumed the role in July 2021. Read More...