In deciding to tweak its news feed for reasons that seem to have little to do with what people are asking for, Facebook is once again confusing its users. PHOTOGRAPH BY PIXELLOVER RM 1 / ALAMY

Facebook’s announcement this week that it would tweak its news feed felt all too familiar: Facebook makes changes, people howl, fortunes are lost, Facebook gets stronger. But then Facebook reconsiders and starts tweaking its feed again. Repeat. At different times, Facebook has prioritized inane apps, like SuperPoke; social games, like FarmVille; social news; or video sharing. The change boosts our addiction to the platform, and then Facebook, like a tyrannical boy king with a short attention span, tosses aside the toy and demands something shinier. This is, of course, Facebook’s prerogative. It owns the platform. However, every time Facebook's news feed, introduced almost a decade ago, is manhandled, I am left wondering whether it has to change the feed with brute force because its algorithms are just too dumb to improve the service in a way that suits both Facebook—by making money and monopolizing our attention—and its 1.6 billion users.

As one of those users, I’d be grateful for improvements. There are days when I look at my news feed and it seems like a social fabric of fun—a video of the first steps of my friends’ baby! My nephew’s prom date! On other days, it feels like a Nascar vehicle, plastered with news stories, promoted posts, lame Live videos, and random content. And I know I am not alone in struggling with Facebook and how we experience it through its news feed.

The new changes to the feed suggest that Facebook is going back to its beginnings. The algorithm will now favor the personal—baby photos, vacation chronicles, and marriage albums. “We often make improvements to News Feed, and when we do, we rely on a set of core values,” Adam Mosseri, the vice-president of product management for the news feed, noted on the company blog. Those values include “Friends and Family Come First” and “A Platform for All Ideas,” and can be best summed up, minus the corporate mumbo-jumbo, as Facebook wanting to make the news feed more social. It wants it to be less of a jumble of videos, ads, and news articles. The decision to revert to the core values is a reaction to a recent decline in original sharing, a trend that has caused a lot of consternation among the Facebook brain trust. Instead of posting updates about their personal lives, users are populating the feed with links to articles from across the Web. As the “friend” circles expand, the feed becomes less intimate and leads to what Facebook insiders, according to Bloomberg, call “context collapse.”

This return to core values could be terrible for the media industry, which, like an aging ball player, has become reliant on the Facebook steroid to jack up page views. News organizations (including this one) rely on the social network as a distribution channel for their stories, videos, and other content. And, in fact, when the shiny toy was content, Facebook had encouraged publishers to be active on the feed. The company created “Instant Articles,” to host publishers’ articles directly on the site, and recently started paying some publishers to create content for Facebook Live. But Facebook now has upstarts like Snapchat nipping at its heels. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, recently said that people spend an average of fifty minutes a day on Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger—an astonishing amount of time. But eMarketer found that the twenty-two minutes per day that people spend on Facebook alone is not expected to increase much in the coming years.

Facebook needs to maintain its vise-like grip on our attention to become a conduit of not only advertising but also commerce, so that it can take a cut of everything. But for now Facebook is relying on advertising. Could it be that publishers, like makers of diapers and shoes, may one day have to spend money to promote their articles and get them in front of us as sponsored posts? In the past, gaming companies and others that had become addicted to Facebook's traffic found that, once the traffic spigot was turned off, the only way to get attention for their offerings was to spend money on advertising. The latest episode is a rude reminder that nothing on Facebook is free.

Which brings me to the real question we should be asking: What are the realistic abilities and limits of Facebook's news feed? The more the company tweaks the feed in a crude and blunt manner, the more one has to wonder if Facebook's alogrithms are not only rudimentary and basic but also possibly the company's Achilles’ heel.

To understand Facebook’s challenge, let’s look at another company that is in the business of controlling and monetizing attention: Google. The search giant became popular because it had a simple product—search results that are fast, without any clutter. The more we used the Google search engine, the smarter the search algorithm got. Then Google introduced text ads, which looked like search results, and the way we reacted to the ads made the index smarter. It wasn't long before ads on the right side of the search results became part of the results and were featured at the top of the page. Fast-forward to today and that simple start, gradual improvement, and increasing addiction to the service have turned Google into a company with annual revenues of seventy-five billion dollars. (Of course, there have been complaints that Google search prioritizes its own services, and the company is facing an antitrust case in Europe that charges it used its Android mobile dominance to push its services.)

Facebook, too, is remarkably successful. But, while Google interacts with users via search, Facebook interacts with users via its news feed. That feed is a random collection of events, information from acquaintances, news links, videos, photos, and other assorted things, including advertising. These create a large number of variables, which make it difficult for the company to create a perfect personal experience—and to still meet its corporate objectives. Its artificial intelligence is clearly not intelligent enough. Ideally, Facebook would take all our clicks and information and would magically give us everything we want, without us even knowing we want it. Among those core “News Feed Values” that the company listed was “You Control Your Experience” and the promise that, through your actions—such as hiding posts from a particular person—the service would figure out “what content is most important to you.” Despite the treasure trove of data on all of us that Facebook currently hoards, the company is long way from finding this ideal mix. And, in deciding to prioritize one kind of post over another for reasons that seem to have little to do with what individuals are asking for, Facebook is once again confusing its users. In what might have been a rare bit of unintentional corporate honesty, Facebook's Mosseri wrote, “We view our work as only 1 percent finished.”