On Thursday, Facebook's Manager of Media Partnerships, Andy Mitchell, told a panel of journalists and fellow Facebookers that the site was moving away from "passive sharing," referring to apps released by the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, SocialCam and others that automatically share users' activity on Facebook. Fellow panelist Liz Heron tweeted the news:

Facebook moving away from passive sharing on Open Graph, Andy Mitchell says. User feedback was that signal not strong. #ONA12 Facebook moving away from passive sharing on Open Graph, Andy Mitchell says. User feedback was that signal not strong. #ONA12-- Liz Heron

Social readers, as news outlets call their passive sharing apps, got off to a great start, driving millions of pageviews and quickly accumulating a staggering number of users. A earlier this year, however, the apps experienced a drastic drop-off in active users:

At the time I was quick to attribute the drop to widespread user complaints; Facebook quickly revealed that, ostensibly in response to said complaints, social readers' visibility in users' feeds had been reduced. AppData's metrics for the WaPo app show that its numbers still haven't recovered, over four months later.