Facebook admits splitting the News Feed in two was a dumb idea

Facebook just did something it very rarely does: admit it was wrong.

The social network is officially ending both iterations of its "Explore Feed" feature, which created two separate feeds for users.

To recap: Facebook has been experimenting with two different versions of an Explore Feed feature. The first was a dedicated tab that surfaced content from pages you didn't follow based on Facebook's understanding of your interests.

The second, which was confusingly also called Explore Feed, was a more aggressive experiment that launched last fall in six countries, which created one feed just for posts from friends and another feed for all content from pages -- that is, posts directly from a brand, group, or publisher.

While the first test was confusing and not very relevant, the latter test was an immediate disaster. Besides being a nightmare scenario for publishers, who saw Facebook referrals flatline overnight, other critics were deeply uncomfortable with the idea of Facebook -- who continues to say that it's not a media company -- requiring publishers to pay (via "boosting" posts) to get back into the main News Feed.

Now, after months of criticism and confusion, Facebook is ready to put the tests behind them.

"People don’t want two separate feeds," Facebook's Head of News Feed Adam Mosseri wrote in an update. "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."

Mosseri notes that the Facebook's other recent major News Feed change -- the one that simply emphasizes content from friends and family -- also means there's less need to have two separate feeds anyway.

That will likely be of little comfort to the publishers who are still struggling to deal with the fallout from Facebook's constantly changing News Feed algorithm. But Facebook already has a message for critics who don't think Facebook is good for business: just leave.

Meanwhile, the company continues to experiment with other types of feeds. Facebook recently began testing a dedicated feed for local news called "Today In," which is available in six cities. They also continue to invest in Facebook Watch, the company's dedicated section for video content.