Facebook killed the Ticker and that's a bad sign for News Feed
When it comes to your News Feed, Facebook knows best.
That's the message the social network has been broadcasting pretty much since it introduced the first version of its News Feed algorithm in 2011.
Six years later, and the company has only doubled and tripled down on that message -- data rules all and Facebook certainly has more of that than anyone else. So who better to understand your exact preferences -- right?
Unfortunately for Facebook, though, many of its 2 billion users would like a little more choice in the matter. (Just look at the number of people who still complain about the News Feed algorithm showing old posts.)
That group was unfortuntaely hit with some bad news this week when it was confirmed that Facebook quietly killed an old feature that gave some of that choice back to users. News Ticker, a feature introduced alongside Facebook's algorithmic feed, is no more.
Depending on how long you've been on Facebook, you may not have known that the feature -- which provided a sort of real-time look at friends' Facebook activity -- even existed. Still, to many, Ticker was the last best way to view a strictly chronological feed without Facebook's algorithms.
To be clear, it is still possible to sort your News Feed by what’s most recent, but even with this feature, Facebook makes it clear that it's not really what you're supposed to do. On desktop, if you opt to sort by "most recent," you need to re-enable this setting each time you open the website.
And, even if you do, the "most recent" version of your News Feed is slow and laggy -- hardly ideal if you want the kind of instant updates you used to get with Ticker. So while the feature may not have been the site's best known or most used, it still had a substantial following (just look at the Facebook help thread on its demise).
Which brings us back to why removing features like Ticker is a bad sign for News Feed in the first place: it puts Facebook's preferences above those of users, sending the message that the company's data and algorithms rule above all else. And that's not great for anyone, except Facebook.
Topics Facebook Social Media
Karissa was Mashable's Senior Tech Reporter, and is based in San Francisco. She covers social media platforms, Silicon Valley, and the many ways technology is changing our lives. Her work has also appeared in Wired, Macworld, Popular Mechanics, and The Wirecutter. In her free time, she enjoys snowboarding and watching too many cat videos on Instagram. Follow her on Twitter @karissabe.
