back to article Facebook clickbait cull

Facebook is tweaking its system in an effort to reduce the number of misleading articles people see in their news feed, aka clickbait. The social media giant is analyzing how long people actually spend reading the article they click on as a way to discern its importance. It claims to have accounted for long articles so human …

  1. Graham Marsden
    Devil

    The Register posted an article on the Facebook clickbait cull...

    ... you'll never believe what happened next...

  2. Richard 12 Silver badge

    See interesting articles with this one weird trick

    I'll believe it when I see it.

    So far I've not seen any evidence that Facebook takes any action regarding outright illegal scams, let alone the common irritating clickbait.

  3. Daniel B.

    Meanwhile

    They've completely removed the ability to report spam. Which means those guys spamming threads with "click here to get free dragon city gems" are able to spam with impunity.

  4. Mage Silver badge
    Paris Hilton

    Key Source of News?

    What, along with Twitter for Media that's given up employing real journalists?

    Facebook is a poor quality noise infested Tertiary source of news. It's social exploitation walled garden parasite, not a news source!

  5. btrower

    Top ten things facebook should do

    I expect they are in the midst of this stuff anyway. The overall strategy is to ethically join forces with users, suppliers and advertisers against the competition. Do a 'grand slam' attack sweep of all low hanging fruit by leveraging their existing user relationship. Justify it by honoring the security and privacy of users.

    1) Keep the pressure on to retain users. As long as they have the revenue necessary to survive they should not be injuring the quality of their system to chase dollars. Treat click-bait as spam and get rid of it.

    2) Add a very high quality search engine. They have the ability to marshall server resources to crawl the entire web in short order. Just removing some existing annoyances would go a long way. Make it possible for a website owner to mirror their service to facebook's servers.

    3) Create a truly killer advertising system by working *with* users to retain privacy and promote only things they are truly likely to want to see. Example: Coupons! So many great ways to make this type of thing work. Make advertisers compete in a 'top ten' offers race where half the people who make it into the top ten are not charged for the advertising.

    4) Set up real-time Q&A that can tie into people's mobile devices. Work to link to Siri and Cortana, etc.

    5) Provide premium streaming content -- music and video. Apple Music, Netflix, Spotify can be beaten.

    6) Make a dead simple online IDE that makes programming against a facebook 'App' API easy.

    7) Move users to the cloud. Create an arm's length joint custody secure information and messaging system that replaces EMail and Messaging with a hybrid that includes trustworthy storage.

    8) Issue facebook charge card to any established facebook user that asks.

    9) Bundle premium stuff for a no-brainer $5.99 per month fee. Existing incumbents are not setting the bar very high when it comes to respecting their users. Facebook is in a position to blow away the competition by *cooperating* honestly with their users.

    10) Issue streamlined facebook browser based on webkit to tightly integrate all of the above and ... make it a no-brainer open source system that anybody can download, customize and build. You go to a link, download an install file and it sets up the entire build system with source code and an IDE that allows you to simply click a 'build' button and it builds.

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