Earlier this week I met a fellow who, among very many other things, is a member of a bicycling group based where I live. Given that I live in a pretty small community, I was stunned I’d never heard of the club, which has 900 active members and runs four or five organized rides a week. How’d I miss it?
Well, the fellow told me, it’s a Facebook group. You should join! For the first time in ages, I fired up Facebook with the intention of actually doing something useful. I applied to join the group, then promptly forgot about it. I lost the habit of checking into Facebook more than a decade ago, and I have all notifications from the app turned off.
Then, as if to tempt me back, Facebook announced the Friends Tab.
The Friends Tab is a new – no, actually, a very old – approach to the Facebook news feed. According to the Times, it’s a “separate news feed for users that featured posts shared exclusively by people’s friends and family.” If that sounds like the Facebook you remember from 15 years ago, well, that’s exactly the point.
Core Facebook app usage has declined steadily for the past decade, and if it weren’t for its acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp, the company would have likely become a Yahoo-like afterthought. Year after year, as the original Facebook sunk into an echo chamber of enshittification, Meta refused to fix its flagship blue app. But this week, it changed its mind. Why?
I think I have a pretty good answer. Meta is, at its core, a media company (I know reading those words will set off my pals at the company, but let’s be honest, a company that gets most of its revenue by selling the attention of its users is, very clearly, a media company). There are many ways to grow a media company, but until recently, Meta has focused on scale (reach as many people as possible) and precision (know as much about them as you possibly can, particularly about buying preferences). It uses data and AI-driven algorithms to create engagement honeypots for its users, and commerce opportunities for its advertising customers.
But this approach has a downside – and we’re seeing it unfold in real time as AI slop begins to flood Meta’s feeds. Meta executives acknowledge as much in interviews with the Times: “This idea of having a central place of what’s going on with your friends, that was like the magic of the early days of social media,” the head of the Facebook app told the Times. “We’re making sure that there’s still a place for this stuff on Facebook. It is something that shouldn’t get lost in the modern social media mix.”
Put another way, Facebook realized it’s lost a big chunk of its original users (like me), and like any good media company hoping to grow, it wants us to come back. I’m going to guess that those of us who grew up on early versions of the app but are tired of the noise inherent in Facebook’s engagement-baited feeds might prove a profitable new market for the company. But first we’d have to start using the app again.
So, will we? I checked out the Friends Tab and…given I’ve not engaged with the app in more than a decade, it was hopelessly outdated, filled with posts from a subset of old “friends” who still post on Facebook. I’m immediately suspicious of anyone who still makes a practice of posting on Facebook, and I found the feed off-putting. It seems the company has something of a coordination problem on its hands. What I’d really like is a fresh new feed of folks I actually want to stay in touch with, but that would require a wholesale re-calibration of my friend group. Not sure I’m up for that level of work – nor is anyone else, I’d wager.
But, if Meta is successful in bringing us back, it could prove a boon for the original app. We digital elders are a pretty attractive demographic, after all. If you’ve tried out the new Friends Tab, let me know. I’ll be there, at least for a while, seeing if anybody wants to head out for a ride!
—