It won't surprise you to learn what Facebook is doing instead: the company is counting on its recent refocusing of the News Feed to please those who want to see more from their friends. The company is also planning to refine the tests themselves, doing more to both choose test areas and tell you what's happening with those experiments.

Facebook regularly conducts tests like this, and there's never a guarantee that a feature will make the cut. However, it's clear that this test was more important than most. The social network has been grappling with not just the split between public and private content, but also the rise of fake news. Any changes it made could potentially have far-reaching consequences, and tests like this let it gauge the effect without ruining its bottom line.