How FB changes to its newsfeed will probably destroy FB's newsfeed.
Mark Zuckerberg has announced that FB is changing its news feed. It's going to limit and remove posts by pages and independent media outlets and promote and feature content from friends and corporate media and sponsored posts.
Basically what people will be seeing on their newsfeed will be corporate ads, news from paying main stream outlets, and friends posts. Almost no original content from FB pages and independent publishers will be shown on the newsfeed. No memes, jokes, videos, almost nothing but CNN news updates, Iphone ads, sponsored content and friends updates will be shown to you on the newsfeed, in short, nothing that makes checking into FB worthwhile. Sounds exciting, right? Newsfeed without news. Just friends and sponsored content. The irony is that people will find out how boring FB and their FB “friends” really are and will probably just leave FB altogether.
The changes are intended to allow people to see posts that they "care about" and want to interact with, CEO Mark Zuckerberg claimed. But it's probably also aimed to prevent the phenomenon of "context collapse", where people have stopped sharing as much information about themselves. If users aren't commenting on or sharing information about their personal lives, then that data can't be used by advertisers. Facebook depends on those ads to make its money, making the phenomenon one Facebook is said to have been worrying about for years. The change to the newsfeed is also meant to extort more money from FB pages and companies which are dependent on FB for driving traffic to their websites. This move could also be FB's response to the criticism leveled at it for spreading "fake news", as it will now show news mostly from “high quality” corporate outlets like “CNN”, while removing and hiding independent outlets. This new “news feed" will be making sure that the news you will see on your newsfeed, are the kind of news that are literally only sponsored by corporations and governments worldwide. One cannot but think how this changes will alienate and drive away a lot of people from FB, seeing how most people today come to FB not because of their FB friends posts but because of news and original content they see on their newsfeed. Zuckerberg promised that 2018 will be the year that he will “fix FB”, instead it looks like the year that FB and certainly its newsfeed will be broken beyond repair.
