Facebook recently changed the default news feed to show only the friends you interact with most. A lot of folks seem frustrated and unhappy about the change. Our very own Jeremy Britton walked over to my desk and said to me:
WTF? I just realized that I don't hear from like 80% of my friends on FB, including you! How could this be a good product decision?"
I log in to Facebook maybe once a week to check in, so any of my updates would not show up in Jeremy's stream. I did however share a few links recently over my news feed which I hoped Jeremy would notice:
Crap man! You didn't see any of the links I posted over the weekend? I wonder if people really prefer to only see stuff from people they interact with most by default?
So we ran a quick Verify test to see which type of newsfeed people prefer and why. Of the 115 people who gave us their opinion 63% wanted the old "Show all my friends in my news feed by default."'
The reasons why people chose each one can be summarized by the following quotes:
Wants to see only people they interact with:
I like the feed with friends and pages I interact with the most because then you can focus on who you are close to rather than on people you don't see as often.
Wants to see all the people:
Just because I don't interact as much with these people and pages, doesn't mean I'm interested in them! And if the feed gets too full of junk, I can always ignore or block what I don't want to see. I'd rather do my own filtering of content, than have facebook do it for me.
We had some pretty surprising findings:
- Males were almost indifferent about the choice. 52% of males test takers preferred to have all their friends in the news feed by default.
- 72% of all females preferred to have all their friends in the news feed.
- 100% of anybody who responded in under 5 seconds preferred to have only the friends which they interact with most in their news feed.
- The individuals who took longer to respond mostly preferred to have all their friends in the news feed. Of those, 83% of people that responded in under 10 seconds preferred to have all the friends in their news feed.