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."
I can see the headline now:
Facebook decides to change policy and you wouldn't believe what happened next!
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.
I feel the same way when any site makes me do some stupid 20 click throughs to read an entire article.
The multiple clicks pissing me off has reached the point of 1 now. If your presenting information, and you have to make me reload the damn page 10 times to update a little paragraph, you're doing it wrong.
...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.
No, they aren't doing it wrong. They are doing it right for their business model, because it works. If nobody saw that crap, click through the click bait, and didn't click the "share to see what happened next" only to be tricked into sharing their account details and not ever seeing what they came to see, their business model would fail.
But enough people fall for the bullshit that I really believe that is how we get GWB and BHO as presidents!
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
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.
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!
I just hope they use image recognition to eliminate my latest pet hate: the click-bait pages that use a screen grab of a youtube video, play button and all, as their thumbnail, trying to convince you it's just a shared video rather than a link.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
And every annoying "Name a word without the letter F. Bet you can't" post.
Clickbait in print is called "sensationalism". It defines some genres of media (tabloids) and was avoided until recently by companies that were considered higher caliber journalism. That we have no "news" above sensationalism today is telling in my opinion.
With all the hyper sensationalism today, I would be interested in seeing a large "news" site like "The Guardian" drop the sensationalism for a few weeks and see what happens. I'm guessing that readership may actually increase, if for no other reason than the appearance of being different. In a society full of bullshit a little bit of honesty may go a long way.
Could be a pipe dream too, not everyone is intelligent or worried about honesty.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.