What prompted Facebook to overhaul its news feed in January 2018 to push friend interactions and de-emphasize passive content? originally appeared on Quora, the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus.

What prompted Facebook to overhaul its news feed in January 2018 to push friend interactions and de-emphasize passive content?

This is likely something Mark Zuckerberg considers strategically important to the company’s long-term sustenance, but they also took advantage of the “good for users” spin to minimize valuation damage as much as possible.

News feed has historically optimized almost purely for engagement — clicks, likes, time spent reading content. They’ve done this largely because this is what’s shown to bring people back and keep them there long enough. This isn’t just for ads, having engagement means you get more chances to expose people to a variety of content.

* I’ve written before about how you need to engage the reptilian brain before you can move to our more sophisticated cognitive centers. This borrows loosely from Dual Process theory in Psychology, the idea that thought can arise in two different ways, or as a result of two different processes. Often, the two processes consist of an implicit (automatic), unconscious process and an explicit (controlled), conscious process. Designing, Fast or Slow? – Quora Design.

* I’ve also written a slightly technical piece on how news feeds work under the hood — Abhinav Sharma's answer to How do news feed algorithms work? You may find this interesting but you don’t need to read it to keep moving on.

However, people have stopped posting as much as they used to Facebook. This isn’t my claim, there’s hard data to back this up. You can argue some of this is due to “context collapse” (see Facebook is worried about users sharing less – but it only has itself to blame) but former Facebook designer Mills Baker makes an argument here that Snapchat’s rise took advantage of a gap Facebook left when it overoptimized for engagement.

In the case of Facebook and Snapchat, I suspect that for several years, the following happened:

* Facebook built itself organizationally around those functions and processes which worked, or in other words, which produced measurable successes.

* As every part of Facebook’s products were locally optimized for metrics —for the system 1 parts of users brains— users clicked more, but gradually —with system 2 reflection— came to feel that the value they got from Facebook was problematized by e.g. the public, permanent nature of posts or the meaningless nature of many notifications, etc.

* Snapchat addressed the system 2 concerns many Facebook users had, concerns which were invisible to Facebook even when research uncovered them because they didn’t appear in the metrics: system 2 concerns about privacy, social value, happiness, etc. For seven years, Facebook optimized for system 1, and once the gap between users’ system 1 and users’ system 2 assessments opened up, Snapchat waltzed in.

* Snapchat explodes in growth, but Facebook struggles initially to compete because every feature or product they test, while better for the expressed system 2 desires of users, is much worse for their system 1 automatic behaviors (and thus for metrics).

To some extent newsfeed already tries to optimize for content from friends and family. It only considers stories to rank from pages you like and people you follow/friend. It’s almost certain that if feed extracted stories from outside just that graph they would find more engaging content, as measured by clicks, reading time and other short term metrics, which is why the question of How would you define the new top level metrics for Facebook News Feed, given the shift in focus from finding relevant content to promoting meaningful social interactions? is important. But it seems like this wasn’t enough, even if you don’t like any pages, it doesn’t take much for non-original content to make it into your feed, all it takes is one friend to like it, and that makes it a candidate for your feed, at which point a feed purely optimizing for engagement will likely surface it to you.

The problem with this trend though is in the extreme this makes Facebook mainly a well ranked aggregator of links from all over the internet. They can likely rank these links better than anyone else for you but this isn’t a strategically defensible product — it has very little differentiation and barely takes advantage of the network effects of Facebook multi-billion person social graph, which is their core asset. One can see Google doing a better job at this and yet the Google Now feed standalone isn’t as nearly as valuable a product as Facebook.

I think this change is a play to reverse the original content decline, and I wouldn’t be surprised if engagement in the short term goes down as a result, but they’re likely making a strategic bet for long-term viability.

Of course note that I’m missing actual data and context from Facebook (I haven’t worked there for years and this answer is based entirely on public information) so I might be terribly wrong and they may have somehow reversed the decline in original content sharing, though that’s not been my experience and that of people I know.

This question originally appeared on Quora. More questions on Quora:

* News Feeds: Is Facebook News Feed getting more boring/stale?

* Algorithms: What's the best way to checking traffic rankings of sites you don't own?

* User Experience: Will UX writing be replaced by AI?

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