A few days ago, Facebook announced a major change of their newsfeed algorithm. According to Mark Zuckerberg, they will be focusing more on “helping you find relevant content. The new goal is to help you have more meaningful interactions”.

As you may already know, until now, their focus was more on news and relevant content. But following the 2016 US elections blunders and the avalanche of fake news, they apparently decided this approach is not profitable anymore.

One of the consequences of this shift is that Facebook users will see more information from the people they follow, and less from pages or groups built around media outlets. Getting your news from Faceboook will be less and less relevant and you may have to rely on other sources for that.

I confess I couldn't refrain myself to connect this statement with Mark's new years resolution to learn more about cryptocurrencies. They may be completely unrelated, but hey, I am free to assume that they are, right? Of course, I may be wrong, and I'm ready to accept that.

But there is some common ground between this "users first, corporations later" approach, and the empowering we get from decentralized organizations. No, I don't think Facebook is a decentralized organization, on the contrary, but I think they are smart and they take from the current trends whatever it might be useful for their business.

Although there was no direct mention of crypto currencies in this announcement, and although I'm well aware that the only mention of that is on Mark's personal post about his 2018 resolutions, I do think the recent change is part of a bigger movement, which was - at least partially - generated by the latest "crypto-craze".

There is a major shift in wealth from corporations to individuals and who else can see this trend better, if not the people who are incessantly monitoring more than one billion people activities? We can only guess and infer, while they also have hard data to back their decisions with.

So if they see more value in user interactions, rather than in news, I guess they know something.

Or maybe they studied the user interactions model that we already have and use here, for almost 2 years now? They may have learned that there really is some financial vale in a "like", after all, not just some ego validation. And probably they also learned you can measure this with, you know, a token...

This doesn't mean Facebook will launch their token this month. They may not even launch a token, as we know it.

But it does mean their business model is shifting dramatically, from a corporate-driven media bucket, to a more user-centric approach. It remains to be seen how much of the data generated by this user-centric approach will be again sold to advertisers and in what form, but until then, let's see how this new model will unfold.

And let's accept the fact that some social media experiments in the crypto world, like Steemit, may have been a part of this business model shift from Facebook.

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I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.

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