You’ve seen the click-bait headlines.
“YOU WON’T BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENED WHEN…”
“THIS VIDEO MADE ME FURIOUS, THEN MY HEART SOARED!”
“THIS FAMOUS PERSON DID SOMETHING AMAZING AND IT BLEW MY MIND!”
“…I SOBBED WHEN I SAW #5!”
Headlines like these have screamed just enough information at Facebook users to make us curious, and prompted just enough of an emotional response to get us to click, for the last few years. These headlines are designed to herd users to high-flash, low-quality content, and drive up revenue for third-party websites, rather than providing high-value information to Facebook users. They’re one of the more frustrating aggravations on Facebook feeds this side of Uncle Frank’s wacky political diatribes, and Facebook has seemed powerless to stop them and unwilling to try.
That all changed this week when Facebook announced new policies to give users better news feeds and more useful information by controlling click bait. It’s no surprise that Facebook would want to help users this way. Unless it controls news feeds, Facebook runs the risk of users seeing them as a cacophony of useless twaddle and, in time, turning to other social media and news sources.
A problem with click-bait articles is in identifying it. Like pornography, most of us know it when we see it, but have a harder time describing what makes a headline click-bait. From a corporate perspective, of course, that isn’t specific enough to control content in a way that’s fair to publishers. In a statement on Monday, Facebook’s Joyce Tang and Khalid El-Arini say they’ve found some reliable ways to identify click-bait.
One way is to look at how long people spend reading an article away from Facebook. If people click on an article and spend time reading it, it suggests they clicked through to something valuable. If they click through to a link and then come straight back to Facebook, it suggests that they didn’t find something that they wanted. With this update we will start taking into account whether people tend to spend time away from Facebook after clicking a link, or whether they tend to come straight back to News Feed when we rank stories with links in them.
Another factor we will use to try and show fewer of these types of stories is to look at the ratio of people clicking on the content compared to people discussing and sharing it with their friends. If a lot of people click on the link, but relatively few people click Like, or comment on the story when they return to Facebook, this also suggests that people didn’t click through to something that was valuable to them.
In the past, we’ve been critical of Facebook’s attempts to control what users see. “Show me everything and I’ll decide if it’s good or not” has long been a popular point of view, and it’s one that we still hold. But with the avalanche of click bait from relatively few sources (No, we won’t give them free publicity; you probably have a good idea who we’re talking about. Besides, highly respected news outlets have started mimicking the style to keep up with the audience numbers.), Facebook finally sees that it must act. For the benefit of users and the corporate bottom line, this is the right course of action.
Who knows, it might even convince us to stop complaining about Facebook’s mobile apps defaulting to “Top Stories” every time we open the dang thing instead of just showing everything. Probably not, but YOU WON’T BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THIS COMPANY MAKES A BETTER PRODUCT! I ALMOST CRIED!
From the article:
>> “Unless it controls news feeds, Facebook runs the risk of users seeing them as a cacophony of useless twaddle…”
Too late. :p
(Don’t know about turning away to other social media though.)
If they really do implement this, it would be a definite improvement. They’d taken to making outgoing links a detriment to people who post them, which to me was annoying. I’m not going to copy the whole of my blog post on Facebook! I would much rather post it on my site and link to it on FB.
So I hope this works. It sounds right.
The trouble with the first method is that I will often open tabs up to read an article I find in my feed and then immediately return to the feed and save the article for later. The ‘time spent away from feed’ variable means nothing to me in terms of how valuable I find the content.
I always just thought of these as the decline of worthwhile journalism.