People are reportedly sharing fewer personal updates on Facebook

Has your Facebook feed turned into a stream of brand updates, memes, and re-shared videos? That's partly because Facebook wants it that way, but it's also partly because people are posting fewer personal updates to Facebook than they used to, according to a report in The Information.

Facebook says, "people continue to share a ton"

Overall sharing reportedly fell 5.5 percent from mid-2014 to mid-2015, so Facebook has fewer posts to choose from for your News Feed. But the bigger issue is this: people are posting far fewer of their own personal updates — stories about their thoughts, their life, what they're up to — to Facebook. The report says this type of post fell 21 percent during that same timeframe. The decline has continued into this year, though at a somewhat slower pace of 15 percent year over year, according to The Information.

Facebook was founded on this type of sharing, and it's still a large part of what gets people coming back day after day. That means this decline is likely seen as a serious issue within the company. The Information reports that Facebook has dedicated a team to figuring out ways to increase sharing. Facebook has also made personal updates more prominent in the News Feed and made it easier to share something of your own, according to the report. These changes have seemingly helped to reduce the decline in personal sharing, but they're far from reversing it.

Facebook downplayed the issue in a comment to The Information, saying, "People continue to share a ton on Facebook; the overall level of sharing has remained not only strong, but similar to levels in prior years."

There are a few big shifts that could explain why sharing has started to slip on Facebook. For one, there are a lot more quality social networks today than there were when Facebook started, with many doing a better job at taking advantage of mobile. Also, it's possible that Facebook has, to some extent, brought this issue on itself. It's constantly changed its mind about what Facebook should be, limiting its size and then growing it, flipping profiles from private to public to private again, and — perhaps more than anything — making the presence of companies and news stories just, if not more, prominent than personal posts. And that's not even taking into account video, which Facebook keeps saying will take over the entire service someday soon. When a network feels this large, people are probably a lot less interested in sharing their personal life.

As The Information notes, the decline in sharing isn't a sign of the end times for Facebook. It's still growing and has a large base of regular users. But in the long run, it's very possible that a decline in personal sharing could be a problem for keeping people hooked.

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