Ask HN: Is Facebook doing "Theater View" as beta for random users?

2 pointswesleyzhao3 comments

I am getting a weird new look on Facebook every time I click on a photo on my news feed. A light-box pops up instead of th normal redirect to the album page. The only difference in URLS I see is the appended "&theater" to the URL. Is this a bug or are they just doing it for random users?

View on HN

Facebook tests features among small pools of users to see how they interact with new interfaces. If they receive positive feedback and meet usability benchmarks, they push the change to the entire userbase.

Short answer: yes, pretty much.

How do they see if there is positive feedback? Do they just troll through my personal wall feed? I've heard some of my friends have been periodically seeing this feature as well.

With a feature like that, they aren't analyzing what people _say_ about it. They are testing the way people interact with it. Perhaps they will test how many images users with the lightbox will look through on average compared to those without it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com