Facebook Inc. has made a lot of changes to its news feed in the last few months, but the social media giant has decided to abandon one experimental feature that would have split the platform in half.

Facebook had been toying with the idea of splitting news feed into two channels. Posts from friends and family would continue to show up in the normal news feed, but posts from brands and publishers would be segregated into their own separate channel called “explore feed.”

The explore feed experiment rolled out to six different countries in October, including Bolivia, Cambodia, Guatemala, Serbia, Slovakia and Sri Lanka. According to Adam Mosseri, head of news feed at Facebook, the goal behind explore feed was to make it easier for users to see content from friends and family. The new feature was also supposed to help users discover new pages and public figures to follow, but Mosseri said that the test did not work out.

“You gave us our answer: People don’t want two separate feeds,” Mossesri said in a blog post. “In surveys, people told us they were less satisfied with the posts they were seeing, and having two separate feeds didn’t actually help them connect more with friends and family.” He said that Facebook also found that explore feed “isn’t an effective way for people to discover new content on Facebook.”

Facebook’s experiment proved to be more than an annoyance for some users, who said that the split made it harder to see important news or other information. Mosseri admitted that Facebook “didn’t communicate the test clearly,” and he said that the company is reevaluating how it tests new features.

The end of Facebook’s experiment is likely good news for publishers, which have already had to navigate a few news feed updates that changed the way users see their posts. Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg (pictured) said in January that he wanted to ensure that “time spent on Facebook is time well spent,” and one of the first changes the company made was to prioritize users over publishers on the news feed. A few weeks later, Facebook made another change that put local news outlets ahead of bigger publishers.

Facebook plans to continue making more news feed changes. Although the explore feed failed, Mosseri said the test “provided us with valuable feedback that we will use to improve News Feed for everyone.”

Photo: Facebook