It wasn't a long time ago when Facebook updated its algorithm, in order to promote high quality articles and reduce the reach of low quality memes. As it seems, this was only the beginning.
According to Co.Design, Facebook is experimenting with a new font for article headlines, which makes it look a lot more like a newspaper.
Although it is still in a testing phase, it makes it obvious that Facebook is interested in the news industry, being hoping to replace news aggregators and feeds. As they mentioned a month ago,"high-quality articles you or others read may show up a bit more prominently in your News Feed"
With so many daily users and such a large amount of articles being shared every single day on Facebook, it is not a surprise to be testing a newspaper-like news feed. After all, how often do you visit the homepages of your favorite websites in order to browse the news? Don't you usually check your Facebook and Twitter accounts, in order to click on the news that friends and pages are sharing and you find interesting? By liking news pages and following the content that we're interested in, we managed to save time and collect anything we like in a single page.
This has already led the news in a more filtered, customized version of the actual homepages, with each one of us only clicking on specific topics. Can you imagine how the media industry will be affected then if Facebook really plans to become a big newspaper/aggregator that is customized for every single user?
High quality might be achieved, but how about broader knowledge, that is sacrificed along with the joy of discovering something new and interesting after browsing a webpage? Will we really read what we want? Would you like to have Facebook as your personal newspaper?
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