Facebook tests a second News Feed, marked with a rocket ship icon, filled with posts from sources you haven't yet liked
Context & Ripple Effects
This rocket-ship test is the first sighting of what becomes Facebook's Explore Feed: months later the company moves the experiment out of testing and adds it under the app's More menu as a permanent home for posts from sources people haven't followed, per TechCrunch's follow-up on the Explore Feed rollout. The through-line is Facebook probing whether discovery can live outside the social graph.
It matters because the Like has been the currency of Page reach — and this feed deliberately routes around it. The same logic resurfaces three years later when Facebook tests a Pages redesign with the Like button removed entirely, keeping only follower counts as the measure of true reach.
First-order effects
- Pages and publishers gain a new distribution surface their existing audience never opted into — content can now reach non-likers without paid promotion or viral sharing.
Second-order effects
- If unliked-source content performs, the Like button loses value as a reach gate for Page owners, pressuring Facebook to reweight its metrics — a direction the later follower-count-only Pages design confirms.
Third-order effects
- A single algorithmic News Feed gives way to a family of purpose-built surfaces: the tabbed Most Relevant/Most Recent/Already Seen test and the dedicated Facebook News section both extend the same fragmentation this rocket-icon experiment started.
The trend: Facebook is steadily splitting the monolithic News Feed into multiple discovery-oriented surfaces, each with its own logic for what surfaces beyond the social graph.