Meta launches new group-focused Forum app

In what may be the most significant example thus far of how social media platforms are increasingly adding features to power their artificial intelligence projects, as opposed to building features for users, Meta has released a new group discovery app, called Forum, which aims to convert its popular groups into a Reddit-like experience.

Forum is essentially a separate app for group discussions, bringing together all of the groups that a user is a member of on Facebook in a separate engagement experience.

As explained by Meta: “Forum gives a dedicated space built for deeper discussions, real answers and the communities you care about.”

Forum users sign-in with their Facebook credentials, which will then populate the app with their groups. Users will then be able to engage in group discussions, or find related groups based on the topics they’re already interested in.

“Your groups still exist on Facebook and anything you share on Forum will be visible in your groups on Facebook,” the App Store description explains. “See what real people are saying, not just what’s trending, and easily jump back in where you left off.”

The bigger focus here, as demonstrated in the above screenshots, is a new focus by Meta on encouraging users to ask questions within groups, and seek out answers from group members.

“Looking for opinions, advice or recommendations? Ask pulls together responses from across groups, so you can get answers right away from people who've been there and join the conversation.”

So why the focus on asking questions?

Because this has become a primary value for Reddit, in providing real, human answers to questions, from users with experience and knowledge in these exact topics, which is also why Reddit is now one of the most cited sources for AI chatbot answers.

The advantage of Reddit is that it can provide expert insights, which are also vetted by Reddit communities, through its upvote and downvote system. So AI chatbots, which cannot think, and have no actual understanding of the answers they’re spitting out, are able to reference the most highly upvoted responses as the most likely relevant answer for user queries.

Meta’s trying to replicate this with Forum, with the upvotes for an answer visible in the second screenshot above. These vetted, relevant replies are increasingly likely to provide the answers to questions that people are asking AI chatbots, and the more that Meta can get people asking direct questions, the more it can increase the value of the utility provided by its AI tools.

Because for all the hype, for most people, AI responses really aren’t that valuable at this stage.

Sure, they can provide insightful, human-like responses, and users are increasingly using AI chatbots as companions of sorts, asking questions of AI tools like they’re engaging with a real friend. But again, AI tools are not thinking, they’re not processing the questions and considering a response. AI chatbots are the next level of Google Search, using keywords and conversational cues to provide the most relevant answer to each query.

But in order to provide the best, most valuable, most relevant answers, AI chatbots need the right reference points. This is a potential problem for xAI’s Grok chatbot, which relies on X conversation data to power its answers. Over time, X is seeing less usage, while bot comments and foreign influence operations pose a threat to the integrity and intelligence of its answers, especially as more of the groups responsible for such realize that they can influence Grok’s answers by flooding the app with whatever they want.

If a new issue arises, and an army of bots floods X with comments that aim to sway the facts of the case, Grok will likely reflect that, because there’s no way to weight one opinion over another, other than via mention volume and community notes, which are also highly inaccurate.

That’s why X is now undertaking a major effort to weed out spam and junk, so these comments can’t impact Grok outputs. But it’s going to be a significant, ongoing effort, and it remains a significant concern for the future viability of its AI tools.

Meta faces similar challenges, in that it needs people asking more questions in order to use those reference points to detect the right answers.

The Forum app is built for exactly this.

The question then is, do users actually want this, or is this Meta trying to make this type of activity happen, in order to fuel its data banks.

My sense would be that users won’t jump to a new app when they already have groups access on Facebook, on which they’ve already established habitual behaviors. But if Meta really wants people to ask more questions, in order to improve its AI models, it could look to force more activity over to this separate app, and put more emphasis on the Ask element.

Either way, it seems like a significant trend emerging in social apps, which are looking to re-architect user behaviors around their own business needs, as opposed to responding to usage trends.