There is no denying that Facebook has conquered the social media sphere. But its strategy to also become a news source for users, didn't work well.
The social giant Facebook is retiring Trending, the box that displayed all the latest news for desktop users.
Available since 2014, it served as a way to get people talking about hot topics. But since Facebook's failed to surface real news among fake news, late in delivery and with some other problems, the section outlived its usefulness.
Facebook said that it failed to gain much traction among users.
"It was only available in five countries and accounted for less than 1.5 percent of clicks to news publishers on average. From research we found that over time people found the product to be less and less useful," Facebook said on its blog post.
The Trending section was once at the center of controversy.
Initially, Facebook relied on human editors to curate the news topics that appeared on it. But the company later landed in trouble with conservatives over claims that editors were not featuring stories from conservative news sites. Facebook later ditched its human editors and replaced them with computer algorithms.
But they too had problems when fake news started surfacing rapidly.
The company then updated its Trending topics' algorithms to better reflect the real world, but that also didn't work out as intended.
After endless criticism, Facebook finally remove the ill-fated trending news section, four years launching it.
Here, Facebook acknowledged that the tool is outdated and unpopular.
The section was also proved problematic in ways that hinted at Facebook’s problems with fake news, political balance and the limitations of AI.
Facebook has also added that users are viewing news over mobile and through video, more often that on desktop. This was the other reason why the Trending section failed to get the boost it needed to thrive.
On its place, Facebook said that the removal of Trending will "make way" for future news products.