Skip to main content
L
Getting people to share more with their friends isn’t always worthwhile.

Matheson describes at a high level a publicly-redacted experiment from a 2021 presentation. Facebook found the experiment increased the amount of original content users shared to their feeds, but time spent on the app went down. Matheson says this would be bad for Facebook because if users see all their friends’ posts and don’t come back, it can’t serve them as many ads. Alison says that the number of times a day users opened the app also declined, as did its “meaningful social interaction” score — so another interpretation is that users would miss content they care even more about, like that from a support group.

Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.