Facebook Finally Offers Chronological, Suggestion-Free News Feed

pcmag.com:

Facebook is now moving to match bulletin-board systems of yore by offering a news feed that stays fixed in chronological order and does not interrupt the flow with suggested posts. 

The new Feeds tab will arrive over the next few days to the mobile apps and web interfaces of Meta’s primary social network, where it will appear as a thumbnail of a screen overlaid with a clock. It dispenses with Facebook’s sometimes-erratic sorting algorithm to show posts from friends and groups as well as pages you follow in old-school chronological order. 

Unlike Facebook’s News Feed today—which can be set to show posts in chronological order(Opens in a new window) but reverts soon enough—Feeds also won’t show any “Suggested For You” posts. It will also allow you to filter what you see by friends, pages, groups or up to 30 Favorites(Opens in a new window) you can designate among those categories. 

But ads remain in this view; a social network that reported 1.96 billion daily active users(Opens in a new window) in its most recent quarter costs real money to run.

This new, simplified interface addresses a near-constant complaint among Facebook users. As CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a post announcing the feature, "One of the most requested features for Facebook is to make sure people don't miss friends' posts."

Offering a non-ranked view that doesn’t reflect any personal profiling will also bring Facebook into compliance with a key provision of the European Union’s upcoming Digital Services Act. 

Feeds will not, however, be the screen that greets Facebook users when they open its apps and sites. They will still open to a home screen, now called just Home, that does feature an algorithmically sorted list of updates as well as Facebook’s