Facebook Cleans Up News Feed By Reducing Click-Bait Headlines 61
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."
"Use our API for links" (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Stop calling them clickbait (Score:5, Insightful)
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.