Facebook Takes Steps Against ‘Click Bait’ Articles | Hacker News Reader

Facebook Takes Steps Against ‘Click Bait’ Articles

nytimes.com

43 pointsdnetesn46 comments

Why oh why didn't the Times give this story the headline, "You Won't Believe What Facebook Is Doing To Your Timeline"?

I'm sure they A/B tested it.

Maybe not. It is the Times, after all - there's no way those "For an Article, Headline Written Like Yoda" headlines are optimized for clicks.

Buzzfeed Editors Hate Them For This One Weird Trick!

Click "share on facebook" to view this article...

"like us on facebook to continue reading"

"Facebook decided to take action against click bait headlines, you won't believe what happens next"

Links to http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2014/08/news-feed-fyi-click-bait... I can't read the submitted article because of the paywall, but does it add anything to the announcement?

The submitted article is shorter and more concise, but you're not missing anything by only reading the official announcement.

Thank god.

I was sad to have to unfollow "Wimp.com". It was (and I guess sort of still is) a site that would upload 5 new videos a day. They'd be anything from funny to cute to jaw dropping to inspiring to just plain interesting. But you could pretty much bet on them being great.

A few months ago they decided to turn their titles into clickbait. It was so incredibly frustrating to see them go down that path. I don't know if their quality bar for videos also dropped, or if that's just my disappointment seeping through.

Wow, I haven't been to Wimp in a while and it looks totally different now. It used to be so elegantly simple.

> Facebook says its algorithm will now consider how long users spend reading an article as a way of judging the importance.

A result of Facebook monitoring your browsing habits on other web sites.

Thank goodness for Ghostery [1]

[1] https://www.ghostery.com/en/

That's not the only way for FB to tell how long you spent on a linked page. If you click a link on FB, then reload the page a few seconds later, they know you probably didn't spend much time on the linked page.

I'm at work so I can't confirm, but isn't the default click behavior to open the link in a new tab/window?

It would be a pretty big assumption to think that someone wouldn't leave that tab open for later, or multitask reading it and Liking their friends' status posts.

Hm, that's true. I would guess that most people don't use the web that way, though. And this is all about averages, so as long as other people don't use Ghostery, Facebook will still edit your feed based on their behavior. The only solution is to get everyone to use Ghostery :)

Can the Facebook tab not tell when it has focus?

But it doesn't know if you left the other tab open in the background to read later (if that page doesn't have effective analytics because Ghostery blocked them).

You're right, but with enough data I suspect that becomes a relatively small error source.

It is knowable whether the page was opened that way, by seeing if the browser environment is still around after the click. The analysis could just ignore that set of data.

So they actually try and do something useful with this power and you're saying that this is a bad thing?

I'm not saying that what they're doing with it is the part that is bad.

They can count the time it took you to go back to Facebook after you clicked, no need for tracking...

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8223697

Did you read FB posting[1]? Especially this part:

  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.

[1] http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2014/08/news-feed-fyi-click-bait...

"One way", and a speculative one at that. Their tracking cookies are a much more effective means to gather that sort of data with certainty. Anything else is just fancy guesswork.

They don't even need tracking cookies. They can just use the Like button.

I worry about this philosophy.

I write very niche articles that are often the sole resource on the internet for that particular topic/question. Admittedly, Facebook referrals are not even on the charts with regards to user visits since I provide information rather than entertainment.

My aim is to for my visitors to spend as little time on my site as possible by giving them whatever they came for. I may have spent hours digging up a phone number, address, directions, tricks or instructions for a particular department/company/thing, and now I'm sharing it with the world. What was going to take you hours now takes you seconds. It's your reward for doing research before starting something.

I have no desire to become a "portal". Heck, people visiting my site directly (rather than a search engine referral) tend to get confused since it's just a bunch of disconnected articles about unrelated topics. I don't want you to spend more than a minute on my site. My "bounce rate" would make most people cringe. As much as someone clicking a link and then going straight back to where they came from can be a sign of them not finding something they wanted, it can also be a very good sign that they got exactly what they wanted.

I don't think Facebook is looking to optimize for those sorts of articles being shared on people's news feeds. It's far less likely that "short article with niche piece of information on specific case" will garner as much interest without context on a news feed (since relatively few people will care when taken from the general population) than "long article that gives an in-depth analysis on something interesting".

If it were Google going with this philosophy, I think I'd agree with you, though.

Yeah, it wouldn't make much sense for Google to do that. When I'm searching for something specific I tend to scan each search result, open the promising ones in new tabs, and immediately just close the ones that don't have what I'm looking for. But that doesn't mean they're not useful in their own right, just that I didn't find what I was looking for there.

I always go from top to down and open a new tab for everything I find reading worthy. Then I close the original tab (e.g. facebook) and go reading them.

I guess that all articles I find reading worthy are going to take a hit as worthless for facebook.

Most non-tech that I know use FB on mobile with the native app.

On the iPhone and iPad, if you open a link in the Facebook app, it opens in the app's browser, not Safari. They could certainly instrument that to report time spent.

>Facebook says its algorithm will now consider how long users spend reading an article as a way of judging the importance.

Now the titles will be "[Number greater than 20] Things You Won't Believe About The 90's"

But seriously, I hope this has a meaningful impact. I despise the lists.

'One Weird Trick To Fight List Articles'

Let's all remember that facebook is not doing this for the users, but just because it has to minimize the most effective strategy --as of now-- publisher use to lure the sticky users out of the facebook cave and onto their websites.

Why can't it be both?

Because it's Facebook.

> Let's all remember that facebook is not doing this for the users

Let's all remember that for-profit companies rarely do things "for the users." That's not a bad thing. [It's only bad in monopolistic situations where there is little or no incentive to improve the service/product in order to make more money].

For profit companies whose users don't pay a dime for the service. I was just pointing that out because this change against linkbaits look like something good for us, against the tyranny of stupidity that even once-glorious publications are imposing on the social networks users. It is not.

Seems it would be easier to just make the "Never show me content from X.com" menu item actually work.

The vast majority of FB uses are using an app, not a browser. clicking a link in the FB app does not take out "out of Facebook" they know if you clicked the back arrow within the app, and went back to your feed.

citation needed - seriously, is there a link to stats that show mobile has vastly more users than desktop for facebook?

Not exactly what you meant: http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/13/facebook-mobile-user-count/

That link shows 700 million daily, 470 million of those mobile. If I understand the numbers presented correctly, then 61% of their audience is using mobile. While more than desktop, it's hardly "vast majority".

Thanks for the link. I was underestimating the impact of mobile. But I believe the parent to my comment was overestimating, and I'm kind of sick of the "everyone uses the web on mobile anyway" meme.

Too bad for Ashton Kutcher as well! His Facebook posts are all click baits!

Facebook makes one small change, you won't believe what happens next!

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