{"id":7108,"date":"2023-07-29T00:10:45","date_gmt":"2023-07-29T00:10:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mysourcefunding.com\/startups\/meta-just-proved-people-hate-chronological-feeds\/"},"modified":"2023-07-29T00:10:46","modified_gmt":"2023-07-29T00:10:46","slug":"meta-just-proved-people-hate-chronological-feeds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mysourcefunding.com\/?p=7108","title":{"rendered":"Meta Just Proved People Hate Chronological Feeds"},"content":{"rendered":"
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For three months<\/span> in late 2020, nearly 7,200 US adults on Facebook and 8,800 on Instagram received a radically different experience than the services\u2019 billions of other users. When they scrolled through their newsfeeds, Facebook and Instagram showed them the newest posts as determined by the clock, not those judged most relevant by an algorithm. The response was clear: Users served chronological feeds got bored quicker and were much more likely to decamp to rivals such as YouTube and TikTok.<\/p>\n

That result emerged from a multimillion-dollar, Meta-backed science project designed to study how Facebook and Instagram affected people\u2019s political attitudes during the 2020 US presidential election campaign. The experiment\u2019s main purpose was to add empirical data to the ongoing debate about the role of Facebook and other social media in shaping political choices or even partisan-fueled violence. But the ancillary results showing that users were put off by chronological feeds are perhaps more interesting.<\/p>\n

Instagram ditched a chronological option in 2016 over vocal user objections, but it reintroduced it last year, same as Facebook. Some users prefer a chronological option to keep up with live events, and some lawmakers have raised it as an antidote to opaque ranking algorithms that can seal people into information bubbles or drive them toward harmful content.<\/p>\n

Yet the new data add to at least two internal Meta studies over the past decade, leaks show, that found displaying posts chronologically caused people to log off. The new results also suggest why, despite regulatory and political pressure, Meta has made it difficult to access alternatives to its standard, algorithm-dominated feeds.<\/p>\n

Repellent Option<\/p>\n

The new data on Meta users\u2019 chronophobia comes the same week that Instagram added a reverse chronological feed option to its new Twitter-clone, Threads. That update may appease some Twitter exiles and live-news addicts who have been loudly demanding it, but Meta surely will be monitoring closely to watch for signs of disengagement.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you think about it, the ranked feed is largely optimized for the consumption and engagement of the viewer\u2014how much time they are spending and interacting,\u201d says Dean Eckles, a social scientist and statistician at MIT who has worked for Meta and testified to US senators about feed design. Companies such as Meta and Twitter train their ranking systems to promote content similar to what users have clicked on, dwelled on, liked, or commented on in the past. Because that approach has proved very effective at holding attention, Eckles says, \u201cany intervention is going to reduce engagement.\u201d<\/p>\n