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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.
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...