(On Friday, the stock market seemed to harbor the same worry; Facebook’s stock fell 4.5 percent.) As two of Facebook’s researchers described in a recent blog post, mindlessly reading the News Feed without interacting much — just scrolling and pressing Like occasionally — was associated with lower mental well-being. There is a story that veterans at Facebook like to tell to illustrate the power of the News Feed. People started creating Facebook groups promising to boycott Facebook, and within days those groups quickly grew to hundreds of thousands of members — the biggest groups that had ever formed on Facebook. All these years later, the story also suggests how hard it will be to alter the purpose of the feed.

Source: New York Times January 12, 2018 21:22 UTC