A year-long series looking back on the most significant moments of the past 25 years, how they changed our world, and how they will continue to shape the next 25.

Max Read writes the Work Friend column for The New York Times and the Read Max newsletter.

The internet has many birthdays. ARPANET, the research forerunner to today’s commercial network, was born Oct. 29, 1969, when the first message was sent between two computers in California. The World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee’s generational advance in user-friendliness, was born on Aug. 6, 1991, the day it went public.

But the modern internet – the internet we use today; the one through which our social, political, cultural and economic worlds have been routed; the thing on which you are more likely than not reading this essay – wasn’t born until much later, on Sept. 5, 2006: The day Facebook launched the News Feed.

The “news feed,” by which I mean not just the specific Facebook feature but the generic, infinitely scrolling, algorithmically sorted, constantly updating central list of “news” that greets users of nearly any social app or platform, has become so ubiquitous and standard that it can be hard to still think of it as a “feature” or “product” rather than as, simply, The Way Things Are. No design feature has been more widely copied or influential this century: An infinite scroll of updates presorted for the user is now the default paradigm and expected user interface for any new “social” app, and indeed for almost any new app or website in general.

But the News Feed itself has shifted the way we understand and think about the internet, information and each other. So many of the dominant experiences and categories of the modern internet derive directly from Facebook’s News Feed.

Without the News Feed, on which algorithmic and personalized sorting of content was first developed, we wouldn’t have the quasi-mystical figure of “the algorithm” determining our cultural consumption and taste. We wouldn’t have the dominating and suffocating category of “slop,” or low-rent content created to fit the demands of the infinite feed. We wouldn’t “doomscroll” – we might not scroll much at all – and we wouldn’t have Twitter, Instagram or TikTok, as we understand them. Nor, without the News Feed, would we have President Donald Trump.

Back in the fall of 2006, of course, the News Feed was mostly just a solution to a problem. In the early days, when Facebook was available only to a few dozen colleges and universities, the social network was effectively a collection of links.

Before News Feed launched in 2006, Facebook users would click around to visit their friends' profiles instead of receiving a stream of updates.MediaNews Group/Boston Herald vi/Getty Images

You would navigate to the home page on your PC, log in, and, basically, click around, seeking out your friends and acquaintances and crushes and enemies’ profiles – writing on their walls, poking them or simply monitoring changes from afar.

From the vantage point of 2025, this probably seems charming. But it was inconvenient, and, worse, at least as far as Facebook’s engineers were concerned, inefficient. The company had found that allowing users to sort their friends’ profiles and photo albums in order of most recently updated had increased pageviews significantly, and executives started to kick around the idea of directly serving to users a list of recent updates, personalized to their networks. Instead of poking around from profile to profile,........

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