[gedrap]

I can totally see genuine reasons for that. Feed is a huge part of the product, and you want to control that (which means controlling UX). You don't want to let things go out of hand. Some of us feel like, well, we can control it ourselves by unfriending/unfollowing/unliking things we don't like. That's true. But we shouldn't forget that we can't apply this assumption to the whole active userbase of Facebook/Instagram. Many many of their users won't bother, or aren't even aware of it.

It's kind of odd seeing all frustrated comments about how it's just about ads and etc. Well, duh, they are a business, not a charity.

The only problem with it is if they disable an ability to switch back. But, again, I can see reasons for that. It might be that they ran some experiments and some that people switch to chronological and then they happen to be less engaged over the time because their chronological, raw feed happens to suck big time.

[RickS]

> we can control it ourselves by unfriending/unfollowing/unliking things we don't like... But we can't apply this assumption to the whole active userbase of Facebook/Instagram.

Perhaps that is the UX challenge companies like these should be pursuing? One of the unfortunate side effects of the valley's growth fetish is that features like "make it easier to break connections" get sharply deprioritized.

I naively dream of a world where products teach the masses "it's easy to settle only for quality, and it's okay to stiffarm the other noise that clamors for your attention"