Facebook Users See “My Quick Experiments” Dialogue

Few Facebook users all across the internet are seeing a small tab on their Facebook for desktop version which reads “QE“. Internet has no idea what the dialogue is and what it is suppose to do. For many users it appeared and vanished again. Lets explore this further and establish if it appeared as a glitch or was it something beta which is being rolled out intentionally.

My Quick Experiments – Facebook Tab

A small tab next to the chat heads appeared on facebook which stated QE, clicking on QE opens up a tab while for some it doesn’t open up anything at all.

This nub can quickly help you test different QE groups that you’re currently working on by automagically modifying the URL “qe” query param.
Worry not! All configurations you add here will be saved locally for future sessions.

The text on the QE Tab reads which is not clear what it is meant to do

Create Group on Facebook Quick Experiments

Clicking on QE icon will prompt you with a “Create New” option which has three fields with placeholder text which reads, “Universe” , “Experiment” and “Group” filling out any values there and clicking Add, adds your test at the top where it says “Your Experiments”

Clicking on “Copy” on your experiments will put the following text on your clipboard

[{"universe":"Univtest","experiment":"Exptest","group":"GrpTest","selected":false,"disabled":false}]

The above code is a JSON representation of the values, intended for easy copy & paste. It seems that it is meant for script or machine testing as that can not be used for human interaction.

Facebook My Quick Experiments is Malware

This has been witnessed by many using Facebook and even those who do not have any extensions etc installed or activated on their browser, it is unlikely that it is a malware of any sorts.

For some users the QE tab did appear but clicking on it did not properly load the dialogue box as I have shown above. While it just showed the the title text as you can see in the image below, the reason of this behaviour is also unknown the same way no one knows why they are being shown the QE icon in the first place.

LaunchDarkly mentions Quick Experiments

A little searching took me to a blog post of september 2018, which talks about Billion Versions of Facebook you’ve never seen , scrolling through that article I found the following mention of Quick Experiments

I kinda wanted to talk about what happens after you roll out a feature. Now your feature’s there, but you wanna tweak it. You wanna see, can you make it better. So, for example, quick … so our tool is called Quick Experiment and it’s really used to launch experiments really quickly so developers don’t have to do… write too much code or worry about how to analyze these experiments and it works across the board, across all our platforms. So you don’t have to write experiments for each platform separately and at any given time, thousand is probably a low-balling figure, we have tens of thousands of experiments running on Facebook, so that’s kind of why if you look at the combination of those, not any two people will probably have a different Facebook experience.

So Quick Experiment works pretty simple to how Gatekeeper would work. So there’s … the big difference is Gatekeeper is binary and Quick Experiment is actually built on top of the Gatekeeper infrastructure and Quick Experiment returns key value pairs. So, it’s really easy to kind of do a little bit more complicated experimentation. The other thing Quick Experiment gives you is automatic exposure and conversion tracking, which is really important because developers hate writing logs and hate collecting logs and figure out how to track them back to their experiments.

Quick Experiment platform will go figure out, “I need to run these six different control groups and a control group as apart of this experiment and give the results.” And then all of that kind of gets piped in and does the real-time analytics.

Excerpts from above linked article where Quick Experiment was mentioned

Facebook My QE is a Glitch

Let me conclude this post by saying that as of now it is not sure why users of Facebook are being shown the QE tab and why it is randomly vanishing, not all users of Facebook have seen this aswell. It is random and users of various countries have seen it too. It can be a Facebook glitch. From the above source it is clear that either it is for developers or internal developer team, and why it would appear out of no where ?

The feature could be for internal testing which might have spread out of the internal team, it could be like “testing a testing feature” and it just glitched out. Facebook users on the newer desktop version have not seen this while only the old design users were prompted with this option.

It is also vanishing for people who saw this randomly. Do let us know if you have seen this and what do you think My Quick Experiments on Facebook might be about ?