Facebook says it's ending test in six countries that moved Pages' posts from News Feed to secondary Explore Feed, is also ending Explore Feed bookmark globally
some work out well and we launch them, others don't and we drop them. Today we're dropping one that didn't work: the Explore Feed test: http://newsroom.fb.com/... Josh Constine / @joshconstine : “Facebook undoes reckless thing after failing to foresee worst case scenario” could be recycled as a headline over and over http://www.techmeme.com/... Maya Kosoff / @mekosoff : Facebook is ending its “Explore Feed” test, which, you'll recall, was a secondary news feed featuring posts from Facebook Pages that users don't follow. It turns out people don't like having two feeds! http://newsroom.fb.com/... Casey Newton / @caseynewton : “People don't want two separate feeds. In surveys, people told us they were less satisfied with the posts they were seeing, and having two separate feeds didn't actually help them connect more with friends and family.” http://twitter.com/... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
The Explore Feed began as a quiet experiment: Facebook tucked a second, algorithmically customized feed of unfollowed sources under the app's More menu in July 2017, then escalated it by moving non-promoted posts from Pages out of the main News Feed entirely in six countries last October. Publishers in those markets saw engagement drop with no opt-out.
Ending the test reverses the six-country split and kills the global bookmark, but it lands amid a broader retreat: Monday Note argued in January that Facebook had already exited news after dismantling brand and authorship signals, and ex-staffers have called the Twitter-inspired 2013 push to surface more news a failed experiment as time spent on the platform declined.
First-order effects
- Pages in the six test countries get their non-promoted posts back in the primary News Feed, restoring the organic reach the October change stripped away.
- Facebook removes the Explore Feed bookmark worldwide, so users who had adopted the secondary feed lose access to it everywhere, not just in test markets.
Second-order effects
- Publishers who spent months adapting to the two-feed structure — or paying to promote posts into the main feed — learn that Facebook can reroute their distribution unilaterally and reverse course without compensation, raising the risk premium on any Facebook-dependent reach strategy.
- The reversal hands critics like Josh Constine a template ('undoes reckless thing') that raises the reputational cost of Facebook's next large-scale feed experiment on unwilling users.
Third-order effects
- Combined with the exit-from-news argument and the ex-staffer critique of the 2013 news push, the episode points toward Facebook structurally deprioritizing publisher content regardless of which individual tests survive — the feed architecture keeps drifting toward whatever maximizes user time, not media reach.
- If the pattern holds, platform-publisher relations harden into a one-sided terms-of-service relationship where distribution changes are announced, not negotiated, pushing media companies toward owned products over rented feeds.
The trend: Facebook is winding down feed experiments that siphon publisher content away from the main News Feed as it retreats from courting media and optimizes for its own engagement curve.