How the World Got Wired · The Social Graph

News Feed

There was one more invention, by Facebook, that I want to tell you about, because it changed something about how human beings spend their attention.

In the early days, Facebook was a place you visited to check on specific people. You wanted to see how a particular friend was doing — you went to their page. You wanted to look up a person — you searched for their name.

In September of 2006, Facebook released a new feature called the News Feed. The News Feed was a single, continuously updating page that appeared as soon as you logged in. It showed you, in chronological order, the recent activity of all your friends — their posts, their new photos, their relationship changes, the events they were going to. You didn’t have to go anywhere. You just opened Facebook, and there it was, an endless scroll of what your network was doing.

People hated it at first. There were protests. Many users felt that the News Feed exposed them — that having all their activity automatically broadcast to all their friends felt creepy. Facebook backed off slightly, added some privacy controls, but kept the basic design.

Within a year, it became obvious that the News Feed was the most addictive thing Facebook had ever built. People would log on intending to check one specific thing and find themselves still scrolling forty-five minutes later. The simple act of reading what your friends were up to, in a never-ending stream, turned out to be one of the most engaging activities a screen could offer.

A few years later, Facebook started ordering the News Feed not just chronologically, but by engagement — by what it predicted you were most likely to react to, comment on, or click through. The posts that made people argue, or laugh, or feel strongly, got pushed to the top. The quiet posts got buried. The system was very good at this. Inside Facebook’s offices, internal numbers showed that the average user was spending close to an hour a day looking at the company’s products. Across all of Facebook’s users, this added up to enormous fractions of human time, every day, all over the world, being spent inside one website.

This was the moment social media became, in a way it had not been before, an attention machine. The point of being on Facebook was no longer mostly to check on your friends. The point was to be on Facebook. Whatever kept you there longer was, automatically, what the system showed you more of.

The same logic, soon, would be copied by every other social media company that followed. By the early 2010s, Instagram (which Facebook bought in 2012 for $1 billion, in a deal that has aged remarkably well — Instagram is now worth somewhere over $100 billion). WhatsApp (which Facebook bought in 2014 for $19 billion, and which became one of the most widely used messaging apps in the world). TikTok, which is owned by a different company called ByteDance and which would not exist until later, would push the attention-engine approach further than anyone had before.

All of these companies, in different ways, made their money the same way Facebook did. They captured the user’s attention, by every means available. They showed the user ads, perfectly targeted, while the user’s attention was captured. And they grew, and grew, and grew.

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