Facebook ends alternative News Feed experiment

San Francisco: Facebook has ended its month-long experiment with the alternative News Feed feature, Explore, that was started in October 2017 in six countries.

We constantly try out new features, design changes and ranking updates to understand how we can make Facebook better for everyone. Some of these changes -- Reactions, Live Video, and GIFs -- work well and go on to become globally available, Adam Mosseri, Head of News Feed, wrote in a blogpost on Thursday.

"Today, we're ending one of those tests: the Explore Feed," the blogpost added.

The Explore Feed was a trial response to consistent feedback we received from people over the past year who said they wanted to see more from friends and family in News Feed.

We also received feedback that we made it harder for people in the test countries to access important information, and that we did not communicate the test clearly, the blogpost mentioned.

Separately, the company is also discontinuing the Explore Feed bookmark globally this week.

Explore gave people a new feed of content to discover Pages and public figures they had not previously followed.

"We concluded that Explore is not an effective way for people to discover new content on Facebook," it added.