Meta Looks To Bring Back ‘OG Facebook’ With Revamped Friends Tab

Facebook’s looking to get back to its roots of connecting friends and family, with the addition of an updated tab for friend-only content, which it hopes will spark more engagement between people in the app.

As you can see in these example screens, Facebook’s updated friends tab, which is being launched today to users in the U.S. and Canada, will now include a feed of all of the posts, stories, and Reels shared by your connections in the app. It’ll also include a module for birthday reminders, while you’ll also be able to access friend requests, and see which of your friends are online at any given time.

Conceptually, that’ll put more focus on friend engagement, as opposed to the AI-recommended content that’s gradually encroaching on the main feed.

Which Facebook says is part of a broader effort to bring back the original “magic” of the app:

“Connecting with friends has been a part of Facebook since it launched. Over the years, Facebook evolved to meet changing needs and created best-in-class experiences across Groups, Video, Marketplace and more, but the magic of friends has fallen away. We’ll be adding several “OG” Facebook experiences throughout the year, beginning with the revamped Friends tab.”

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has also provided his own explanation for the change in an interview with YouTube stars Colin and Samir:

“Facebook started off as this online directory for people to get to know the people around them in their communities, [and] then it sort of evolved in this direction that one part of it, which was sharing and News Feed, just completely outscaled, and ended up being the most important part of the product. And we just focused on that, and now we’re here, 21 years later, and that feed part in the sharing ecosystem is used by three billion people around the world. People spend a lot of time on it, they enjoy it, but this funny thing happened, which is that a lot of the other kind of fun and useful parts of the original experience, we just sort of didn’t focus as much on. And not only did we not focus on them as much, but I kind of look around the internet today, and I realize that no one else actually recreated a lot of these things that used to be pretty magical about Facebook either.”

As such, Zuck and Co. are now looking to bring back what was great about Facebook in the early 2000’s, with this revamped friend feed being the first step in its “old school” Facebook revival.

Which seems like an interesting idea, prompting more friend engagement in the app that everybody is on, by giving it more specific focus.

But will it actually work?

Well, no it won’t.

No doubt Meta has done its research, and has its reasons for trying out this new experiment, but there are various reasons by “OG” Facebook went away, and it’s not just because Facebook decided to stop prioritizing friendly interaction.

For one, nobody posts on Facebook anymore. Your friends are posting way less, and as such, your feed of dedicated friend content is going to be pretty bare, and pretty unengaging to start with.

It also won’t be the main feed, and most people won’t bother to tap across from the main feed to the dedicated friends tab. And if they do, they won’t find much content, giving them less reason to come back.

The initiative also misses the fact that most people stopped sharing on Facebook because it got boring, it got divisive to share your opinions (and get criticized, often by friends and family for such), and we all moved to smaller private messaging groups instead to avoid the exposure of the main feed.

These days, people are far more likely to share in private than they are in public, and I don’t see how a dedicated friend feed changes that.

Finally, there’s also Meta’s recent shift in moderation policies, which will see more political content returning to user feeds, and less friction in re-sharing of misinformation, with Community Notes unlikely to deter some of the most controversial discussion points.

Political posts are a big part of the reason why people stopped posting on Facebook, so looking to put more focus on friend posts, while also bringing back political content seems like a dangerous mix. And not, based on trends, an overly engaging one.

Overall, there’s no reason to think that this will be a significant update, but Meta seems keen to push this rosy view that Facebook is all good, and a great place to hang out, and forget the rise in misinformation as a result of the switch to Community Notes.

Yeah, I don’t see it, but Zuckerberg says that there’s more to come in its new OG Facebook revamp.