Facebook eliminating the junk in your News Feed
As reported by multiple sources this week, including Reed Albergotti (@WSJdigits) of the Wall Steer Journal, Facebook is cracking down on click bait.
All too lawyers and other professionals I speak with complain about all the junk they see on Facebook. Part of the reason is that they don’t use it enough to help Facebook know what they like. At the same, Facebook acknowledges they have a problem with “click bait.”
From a Facebook press release on Monday:
“Click-baiting” is when a publisher posts a link with a headline that encourages people to click to see more, without telling them much information about what they will see. Posts like these tend to get a lot of clicks, which means that these posts get shown to more people, and get shown higher up in News Feed.
The problem really isn’t the lack of information telling you what you’ll see, it’s the junk you see when get there. Cat videos, celebrity gossip, and “listicles.”
Just as Google wants you to receive what you are looking for on a search or a news program wants to get you the most important news, Facebook wants you to receive what you consider the most important information and news.
The problem is when you get suckered into clicking on bait Facebook’s algorithms think that’s the kind of stuff you want. You get more junk and your Facebook experience gets worse.
How is Facebook going to reduce 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.
Facebook is becoming the face of news and information for many people in our country. They’re more apt to receive news from Facebook via a friend than from traditional news outlets.
Knowing this, Facebook is constantly refining its algorithms to deliver you the type of content you prefer to see in your News Feed, a News Feed that is unique to you.
I continue to increase the amount of time I spend on Facebook receiving news and information as well as engaging people I know personally and through business. Fro everything I see, Facebook continues to improve my experience.
Image courtesy of Flickr by FACEBOOK(LET)