Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted a message detailing the 10th anniversary of the site’s News Feed.
“At the beginning of Facebook, there was no News Feed. For more than two years, Facebook was just a collection of profiles. You could visit a friend’s page to look up some basic details about them, but there was no way to see updates from all your friends or be sure they saw yours,” Zuckerberg wrote on his Facebook page.
He continued: “With News Feed, all of a sudden you could share with all your friends at once. And you could see what was happening with all your friends in one place. News Feed was the first real social feed. It was such a fundamental idea that now, 10 years later, every major social app has its own equivalent of News Feed.”
Zuckerberg explained that “not everyone liked the idea immediately” and “there were actual protesters in the streets outside our office demanding we change.”
“Technically, News Feed is one of the most advanced systems we’ve built. For more than 1 billion people every day, it considers everything your friends are posting and all of the media content you might be interested in, it considers how much you might care about updates from each person or interest, and then it tries to show you what you’ll find most important. Nothing like it has ever been built before,” Zuckerberg wrote before thanking team members who helped create the product.
Despite being around for a decade, News Feed has continued to change. Facebook recently announced an update to reduce posts considered “clickbait,” aiming to allow users to see more stories they want to see higher up in their feeds.
Facebook research scientist Alex Peysakhovich and user experience researcher Kristen Hendrix penned a blog post on Thursday that outlines the latest changes.
“We’ve heard from people that they specifically want to see fewer stories with clickbait headlines or link titles. These are headlines that intentionally leave out crucial information, or mislead people, forcing people to click to find out the answer,” they wrote.