Facebook’s new algorithm is about to put end to clickbait

Reading Time: 2 minutes

 

ClickbaitEvery time You open Facebook News Feed you’re likely to see many clickbait articles with headlines like: “I thought I wanted a baby someday, but after watching this … yikes.”;” You’ll NEVER believe which two stars got into a fight on the red carpet last night!! CLICK to find out which starlet was fighting over!! à”. Those headlines are annoying and articles they direct to almost never meet our expectations from the time we clicked on them in a Facebook feed.

The great thing is that Facebook took notice of it and for the second time tried to fight with them. Previously the algorithm was searching for distribution of posts that led people to click on them and afterwards very quickly come back to News Feed without liking the page. This didn’t help much as these type of posts were still showing quite regularly.  It was easy to overcome the algorithm by creating a new page or even new post which had some time until it was stopped.

The new algorithm is no longer searching for symptoms as it focuses on the source of the problem. This allows it to work much faster and stop post before anyone will click on it. To achieve it Facebook team manually classified tens of thousands of clickbait like headlines in order to teach algorithm how they are composed and be able to distinguish them from content shared by legitimate publishers.

The system identifies which post is a clickbait and from to which domain it is linked to. Thanks to it punished are both posts itself but also a publisher. Pages and headlines that often use clickbait headlines will appear lower in News Feed.

In order to protect algorithm from reverse engineering and eventually overcoming it, Facebook will not reveal guidelines on how it is defining clickbait. It should motivate legitimate publishers to use headlines which do not withhold information allowing to understand what is the content of an article.

I hope it will motivate legitimate publishers to name their articles correctly as I saw that even popular new sites are starting to use headlines which do not reveal the content only luring us to click on them in order to find out what it really is about.

How do you like the new algorithm? Do you think it will be successful and long-lasting change?

 

Sources:

http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2016/08/news-feed-fyi-further-reducing-clickbait-in-feed/

https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/04/facebook-clickbait/

http://businessinsider.com.pl/international/facebook-is-changing-its-news-feed-to-try-to-stomp-out-clickbait/zp6g5n0

Tagged , ,

Leave a Reply

WordPress › Error

There has been a critical error on this website.

Learn more about debugging in WordPress.