Slashdot Mirror
Facebook Cleans Up News Feed By Reducing Click-Bait Headlines
An anonymous reader writes "Facebook today announced further plans to clean up the News Feed by reducing stories with click-bait headlines as well as stories that have links shared in the captions of photos or within status updates. The move comes just four months after the social network reduced Like-baiting posts, repeated content, and spammy links."
Title speaks for itself ;-)
I can see the headline now:
Facebook decides to change policy and you wouldn't believe what happened next!
Fuck Buzzfeed with a rusty buzzsaw.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Answer: The answer to all questions posted in a headline, is of course "NO!"
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
this being making the front page of slashdot... is that irony?
If you don't already know, the real value of facebook is the content that people post and the data mining that takes place behind the scenes. These social networks are a huge "SELL TO ME" sign that glows brighter with every like, repost, and share. I'm not surprised that the $$$ machine want's to control the content, they don't need us urinating in the same well we drink from.
Mark Suckerberg is a master baiter
After reading a shameful article praising clickbait I realize the term isn't negative enough. "Bait" can be good or bad. Instead, please call them "misleading headlines" or "incomplete headlines" or "editorializing headlines."
Every other post in my news feed seems to be somebody doing an ice bucket challenge. Is there some way they can filter them as duplicate content?
Facebook is only cracking down on clickbait because they don't want other entities siphoning off ad revenue they could be getting themselves. If vapid, inflammatory, mindless shit gets them more ad placements then they'll put it up without hesitation.
Why anyone uses the place is beyond me. Their users are just cattle to them. You don't need any more proof than what you can see when you go to place an advertisement. You can drill down to any imaginable demographic in any imaginable geographic location (Both referenced against eachother) It's pretty disturbing.
that continues on to other sites, like Wired, or that one site with "News for nerds."
Often there may be an interesting tidbit in the clickbait articles, but it's obviously annoying to have to actually click on them and find the actual sentence of info buried in 5 paragraphs of fluff and 20 ads.
There are some Twitter feeds that spoil the clickbait from it (https://twitter.com/SavedYouAClick is probably the most "useful" at this) but it'd be nice to automate the process so that when someone posted any headline with clickbait, Facebook would just drop the answer right below. Actually a browser plugin would work even better, since it could work on any site.
Look, the "You're not the customer. You're the product!" saying was old in 2007. Fuck, it was old even in 1997, back when there were ISPs that offered free dialup Internet access in exchange for showing the customer some ads.
I don't know why people like you feel the need to point out this idiotically obvious fact whenever the topics of Google or Facebook come up. It's especially stupid to point it out here at Slashdot, of all places. Everybody here is already well aware of the concept.
So why the fuck do you keep trying to point it out? Is it somehow "insightful" to your small mind, decades after everybody else learned of the concept?
...FB just banned their existence.
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
They need to be careful and make sure they don't reduce Robin Williams tributes or Ice Bucket Challenges. Otherwise there won't be anything left :(
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
'Nuff said
I clicked a link called "Facebook Cleans Up News Feed By Reducing Click-Bait Headlines". Turned out just to be a click-bait story.
Did you notice the "use our API for links" bit at the end? Let's be honest here clickbait is far more nuanced than any algorithm could predict. FB is likely doing this for 2 reasons, neither of which actually give users better content (and would you really want FB to decide that for you anyways?)
1) They want to appear to be on the user's side
2) They want to force everyone to use their API link format - so they can better track links and clicks.
I'm sure this will remove the lowest of the low-hanging-fruit, and that's good. But let's be clear about FB's motivation here.
Mainstream news outlets are a lot more guilty of clickbait headlines than Buzzfeed. Don't get me wrong, Buzzfeed is a dopey website, but the mainstream sites have taken it to a whole 'nother level.
If you use the twitter, the absolutely best follow is someone called, "@SavedYouAClick", who basically takes clickbait headlines and defuses them by reading the article and giving you the bit you actually might want to know, saving you from having to click and a barrage of ads and trackers. They're really really useful, and now whenever I see clickbait, before I even think of clicking, I go see @SavedYouAClick. I wish I knew who it was so I could thank them personally.
For example, from the other day:
or,
My favorite is when @SavedYouAClick really nails some sacred cow:
You are welcome on my lawn.
At first I was laughing, but the end of this video just blew my mind !
Now cue-in hordes of facebook users who will inevitably start to complain that facebook changed again their interface, and now it sucks, and that's it, they are going to deleter their account. Definitely. I swear it.
Like at each of the other 5 big changes over the last year.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
This is solely about viral marketing and Facebook ad revenue. Preventing people from seeing naturally shared articles will prevent things from naturally going viral. In order to get views marketers will need to pay for views.
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
turned off Top Stories yet?
It's bullshit that one has to reset a boolean preference every few days for something no one wants.
And every annoying "Name a word without the letter F. Bet you can't" post.
I know another place where there is a lot of click-bait links and summaries.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
In the quest for the Almighty Dollar, Facebook ain't what she used to be...
This is what users want, which is what FB was 4 years ago.
If only Slashdot could do the same
//TODO: create a signature
n/t