Facebook likes to experiment with a lot of new features to see how the public will react to it, which is more often than not, negatively. The latest rumored experiment may cause even more of an uproar as they will be tinkering with a new, radical layout for the News Feed. The reason for the reported overhaul of a Facebook staple is to “force” people to view Stories which they want to be as successful on the platform as it is on Instagram.
According to reliable tipster Jane Manchun Wong, the social network giant will be introducing a “Stories Feed” which will merge your regular News Feed posts with Stories from your contacts. So while we’re used to scrolling vertically through the feed, the redesign will see us swiping through posts. Each post will automatically rotate after 6 seconds regardless of the post, which is how the Stories feed actually works.
Now this would be okay if it’s just a photo that you’re looking at or a short status update. But what about those that post paragraphs of text? Unless you’re a speed reader or there’s a way to long press it so it won’t rotate, then you’ll probably not be able to read the whole post. We assume that videos will still play and not rotate automatically until after it’s finished or else this would be pretty useless.
For monetization, there will also be sponsored posts included in the new Stories Feed, just like it is in your current News Feed. Now this is probably one of the top reasons why Facebook is considering doing this, so users will still be able to view those paid Stories unlike now where you would have to intentionally go to the Stories section, which a lot of people still don’t do.
Another rumored new thing that Facebook is thinking of doing is to unify chat across its three major apps, namely Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp. They will also be bringing end-to-end encryption to this unified chat, which is something that a lot of users are looking for now. Given Facebook’s security issues, this may be welcomed by users while critics may doubt their capability to do so.
