Social media has transformed, and Facebook has to transform along with it.

Young adults told Facebook in a survey that they thought it was irrelevant, negative and undifferentiated. They also said it was for older people. 

Actually, they were right as Facebook's average user age increased my more than five years between 2013 and 2021.

This opened the door for TikTok to young adults.

Facebook is now responding to the surge of TikTok. as it has accepted that sometimes, the most “social” interactions with “media” happen in private message threads, not feeds.

Also, while content from friends and family can be interesting it often pales in comparison to content suggested by artificial intelligence (AI). 

So Facebook is transforming itself to adapt.

Back when discovery on the internet was limited Facebook came of age by offering far more than simple search by connecting you with friends and family who’d share articles, images and videos you’d find interesting, and by pushing content to you, instead of making you look for it. 

Skip forward and the likes of YouTube and TikTok took advantage of the offering Facebook did not bring to the table by using AI to comb through billions of videos and recommend what people, personally, would find interesting. As a result, when someone found something that they liked, they’d often share it via text — not feeds — with close friends and this saw many young people that were getting online for the first time decide to participate on these platforms, instead of Facebook.

Now, it's clear that Facebook has accepted that the world has moved on and it too has to adapt in order to stay relevant by showing users a mixture of showing stuff from people you know along with content from elsewhere more often.

The idea is to get people finding content they like on Facebook and discussing it, privately, in messages with their friends. 

A good move I think!