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Facebook Might Finally Kill Clickbait With New Algorithm Tweaks (thenextweb.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Next Web: Facebook is bringing two additional tweaks to its News Feed algorithm: time spent viewing and page post diversity. The former is an effort to weed out clickbait and bad content by attempting to quantify quality links. The change appears to be a mobile-first solution, as the announcement only states that Facebook will measure the time spent looking at Instant Articles or those within the mobile browser. Facebook also reports that users enjoy reading articles from a wide range of publishers, a revelation that led them to tweak the algorithm for greater diversity of page posts. In short, the idea is to reduce how often people see content back-to-back, or in short order, from the same page. For most pages, the content is spread out enough to where this shouldn't be much of a problem, but for those that post several updates in a few minutes, it could lead to some of the content not being seen.
What's a Facebook?
Facebook kills clickbait with one simple tweak... [click here to read more!]
through their little brains. As you can tell, a science fiction writer I am not. But these so-called social networks write it for me.
Facebook kills clickbait with one simple tweak... [click here to read more!]
.. and you would NOT have guessed what happened next! [click here]
I wish social networks would stop trying to prioritise my news feeds and home pages for me. I want every post by every page and person I follow and I want it in chronological order. I want to know that when I scroll back to a certain point I have read everything that has been posted since now and that point in time. I understand advertising and monetising and all that jazz but it really puts me off using social networking sites like Facebook.
My entire newsfeed is stuffed with clickbait from places like the Huffpost, New York Times, and the Washington Post. The WaPo just put out an article about an evangelical couple having black triplets. You're telling me that isn't click bait? This sounds like a weak attempt to drown out lesser outlets for established ones.
Find out why Facebook hates this one weird click!
The Facebook IS the clickbait !!! dun dun duunnn
maybe something like if page.title.contains("You won't believe"){setclickbait(true);}
Sounds good for journalists, but terrible for privacy.
To read more about this shocking revelation, click here to learn what happens next! The answers will amaze you!
Facebook is supposed to act as a honeypot for worthless clickbait and help keep some of it from wandering out into the parts of the internet that don't totally suck. If they become less hospitable, there's a risk that starving herds of clickbait will start migrating and that won't be pretty.
What business is it of Facebook to suggest what news I read and who gave them permission to monitor my browsing habits?
/etc/hosts: and insert this line: 127.0.0.1 facebook.com ..
The solution is to edit
I don't know much about facebook because I only tried it for a year.
But it seemed that they sorted peoples posts and because I was just starting on facebook, my posts never showed up on my family's app when we checked their feed. At family gaterings it was also clear that no one had read my updates on my personal projects(but I also only posted on facebook once a week), while they expected that I had read all of theirs multiple daily rants and opinions on everything.
So it was a massive waste of my time in more than one way, with only 30 "friends", I got buried below people with 500 "friends" it appeared.
Well, it was not a huge loss. I completely failed to see what benefits it gave me and how it could improve my life. I never figured out their algorithms or what it could do for anyone.
After a year, I deleted my account and no-one even discovered that. Conversations at family gatherings following the deletion of my account, revealed that people still thought I was reading THEIR posts and never saw that my account had been deleted. I didn't tell them just realized that my family perhaps didn't really care about me, so I stopped caring about them and don't really visit anymore.
OK, let me guess...you clicked? ;)
Ezekiel 23:20
Gotta fix this for you:
Facebook kills clickbait with one simple tweak! Number 6 will blow your mind!
Really though, the clickbait industry is going into a death phase and has been since last year, and with any luck it'll kill the sites. Advertising revenue is drying up, people aren't going to the sites. Some sites have been bleeding views and uniques others have simply stalled and/or entering serious declines (article paywalled)like Buzzfeed which has lost ~32% of it's traffic since last year.. Vice for example has bled ~18% of it's traffic. Huffpo? Laying off. Salon? Laying off. Even sites like Cracked, bleeding traffic and was sold off earlier this year. Lots of stories, lots of sties besides those that live and breath on clickbait are dying. Other publications(like media) that are pushing very specific agendas, are also suffering heavily as people turn away.
Om, nomnomnom...
How will the internet survive without them?
Thiis isn't going to stop the clickbait headlines. This will however stop the article structure of having one sentence of content or a picture surrounded by 100 ads on the page with a tiny next page button hidden among a bunch of links to other sites. Frankly, I wish Facebook would simply block sites that structure their pages that way.
Advertisers hate him.
Find out how this website owner got rid of click-bait with this one weird tweak.
[click here]
How about when I say "Don't show me things like this", you don't show me things like that.
Like when I cross out every sports ads, I'm probably NOT interested in Sports.
Like when I hide every fucking Timehop page and friend post that includes it, you stop fucking showing them to me.
Does it really need that much of an algorithm to do what your own options say? Why would you WANT to show me more things that I'm deliberately going out of my way to remove (and not the others that I'm not)?
I stopped using facebook when they decided that I no longer wanted to see things in sequential order and generally hid stuff from people I gave a shit about.
Go fuck yourself facebook, I've been gone for three years, not looking back.
Clickbait headlines are so formulaic... it almost seems like the first step in the clickbait war would be to nuke anything with one of those formulaic headlines.
I'm not sure that clickbait is inherently bad, so perhaps evolutionary pressure to create a better headline would not be bad either.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I would love to see then surface an optional click layer when you return from an external article link, maybe as a strip across the bottom of the item panel that let you just with one click rate the link as interesting or not. It should be done in a non-model way, so it could be ignored by anyone who doesn't bother. Some way to punish clickbait directly would really help.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
I'm not sure that clickbait is inherently bad
I am. Clickbait does nothing but waste one's time. I've gotten to where I never click a link in facebook, especially ones that facebook "suggests", because every single God damned one of them are worth less than nothing.
I laughed at the slashdot headline. Facebook fighting clickbait? That's like a coal-fired power plant fighting global warming. CLICKBAIT IS WHY PEOPLE BUY STOCK ON FACEBOOK. Their entire business model is based on clickbait.
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Meanwhile, traffic on my ad-free site has tripled in the last year.
Free Martian Whores!
if fb does eliminate clickbait ... what will be left? the internet will have to shut down ...
Time spent looking is a metric Google have been using for years to estimate the quality of their search results (and relevance of their ads too, I suppose).
I'm surprised Facebook didn't do that.
I don't even look at my news feed anymore, nothing but spam. It tends to show me links to things rather than the user generated content that I want to see. I think the same happens in reverse, I rarely post because my posts are making it to my friends news feeds. I configured facebook to add notifications for a handful of friends and family members that I want to see posts from. Once or twice a week I skim the facebook notifications page, ignore anything that says "shared", open the few "updates" and then I'm out of there. I think the social network is dead, and there seems to be nothing else out there to take its place. And even if there was, everyone over 20 is only on facebook.
Buzzfeed HATES it!
Gotta fix this for you:
Facebook kills clickbait with one simple tweak! Number 6 will blow your mind!
Really though, the clickbait industry is going into a death phase and has been since last year, and with any luck it'll kill the sites. Advertising revenue is drying up, people aren't going to the sites.
This.
And it is entirely because the advertisements have become too insidious, too annoying and too intrusive.
Advertisers have learned that if you load the advertisement, especially the interstitial too quickly, before giving the sucker... erm, I mean viewer a split second view of the content than they'll instantly turn off. So they let the page load first and then load the ad over the content.
Sadly the only defences against this are adblockers or learning which sites are not taking the piss with advertising. Whilst I prefer the later, more and more sites are making me dependent on the former. Also, having recently moved countries, I'm having to learn which local sites are abusing my internet connection... Londonist... I'm looking right at you.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Vice for example has bled ~18% of it's traffic.
Does that include traffic lost from slashdot because of beta?
so companies would use clickbait AND astroturfing.
I'd much rather they fixed their stupid comment system, since it infects other websites with it's presence. As a single father working on my laptop, they use up the time I could be spending making 500$ a week from home! [click here]
Facebook kills clickbait with one simple tweak... [click here to read more!]
... and Facebook suddenly disappears from the Internet forever ... ... much to the delight of the other half of the world's population that doesn't use it and could care less about it.
magic word: trending