Facebook wants to be cool again

Be cool, be cool, be cool… in short restore the appeal it may have had in its early dayswhen resources They fed almost exclusively on the posts of people with whom we had some kind of relationship, whatever that was, to add them as contacts. While I’ll admit that I was more into Orkut and MySpace at the time, that I’m fascinated that it still exists even though it has nothing to do with what it originally was, I have quite fond memories of the early years of Mark Zuckerberg’s Social network.

Over time, however, something began to change.. Suddenly, when you checked feed When searching for the latest news from your contacts, publications that you did not expect to find began to appear, both advertising, which could still be understood in the way that the platform had to be financed in some way, and publications of pages that, according to the criteria of the algorithm, would may be of interest. The problem is that, at least in my case, the success rate was exhausting.

Then they started to come (or to see the light to be more precise) platform security issues. Although some people had warned about this before, the massive revelation came in 2018 when the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke. Since that tarnished reputation, everything seems to have gone downhill as scandals kept happening until its parent company decided to change its name from Facebook to Meta. And yes, I know the official explanation is that the Metaverse project became an absolute priority, but frankly, I don’t think that alone justifies the name change.

At the same time, Facebook is suffering from another problem that is very disturbing at the Menlo Park offices. I think losing users who are not attracted to your designand while among older people this may be mainly due to the platform’s problems, it is most prevalent among the youngest, who reject Facebook for considering it an “adult” social network.

In The Verge, they spoke with Tom Alison, head of the Facebook app at Meta and that in said role: «oversees the development and strategy of News, Stories, Groups, Videos, Marketplace, Games, News, Pairs and Ads, among others«, As we can read in his official profile in Meta. His biography in the company dates back to 2010, where he has already undertaken other adaptation and change processes in the past.

Probably the most interesting aspect of this conversation is that while the general demand is for feeds to be more “personal”, i.e. to return to the approach of the early years, Facebook seems to have other plans. How? Take inspiration from TikTok, a network where a large part of the audience that the social network intends to attract is located, showing more “fun” content from people you don’t know.

This approach, contrary to what it may seem, makes sense, because the TikTok model has proven to be the most effective in keeping the attention of its users, who usually mention that time flies when they consume content from the said service. The question is though yes, Facebook will be able to change the perception of said audience, something that seems much more complicated to me. And what’s worse, you lose users along the way who are looking for the exact opposite. No doubt it’s a bold move, yes, but a risky one.