
News Feed FYI: Click-baiting - btimil
http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2014/08/news-feed-fyi-click-baiting/
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mbesto
Round and round the circle here we go...

This is what "growth hacking" really looks like today...

1\. Manipulate a non-perfect signal-to-noise ratio ranking scheme with the
most traffic (PageRank/EdgeRank)

2\. Gain massive popularity

3\. Sell your business to a greater fool

4\. Ranking scheme changes rendering your model worthless

Demand Media, Zynga, Socialcam, etc. etc. ....and now BuzzFeed. The list goes
on and on. The winners are the investors and the ones creating the ranking
themselves, no one else.

~~~
the_watcher
I think you'd be right about BuzzFeed if this happened ~a year ago. Now,
BuzzFeed has so much content, and they push it so hard on visitors, that I
would be surprised if they didn't actually score pretty highly on this metric
(although I was a bit unclear on if this was referring to URL level or domain
level time on site). Also, so much of BuzzFeed's content are long lists with
large images or gifs that people stare at that they aren't going to be hit as
hard as UpWorthy (who pioneered the "You Won't Believe..." headline. Finally,
BuzzFeed has actually gotten enough traction to now be able to hire real
journalists to create actual content.

~~~
tnorthcutt
_although I was a bit unclear on if this was referring to URL level or domain
level time on site_

It's simply _time away from Facebook_ , since that's what they can measure.

~~~
jasallen
Unless while away you are on any page with a facebook 'like' button. In which
case they can monitor exactly your behavior. Fortunately there are very few of
those. 0_o

------
cheepin
"80% of the time people preferred headlines that helped them decide if they
wanted to read the full article before they had to click through"

What in the world do the other 20% want?

~~~
mewse
and you won't believe what the other 20% wanted.

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otikik
I make a point to never follow a link containing the strings "You will never
believe", "You will be amazed", "We didn't expect what happened next" or
similar lazy copy text. I'm considering developing an adblock-plus-like plugin
to remove them from the pages I visit.

~~~
dequis
There's "downworthy", which doesn't remove them, but turns them into
"realistic" versions:
[http://downworthy.snipe.net/](http://downworthy.snipe.net/) ("Literally" ->
"Figuratively", etc)

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nemothekid
Reminds me of a similar action YouTube took against the ReplyGirl
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reply_girl](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reply_girl)),
by similarly factoring engagement in their ranking algorithm.

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dredmorbius
Facebook isn't a company I praise often, but this is both a very good change
and one which I desperately hope will carry through both to how other sites
(HN, reddit, G+, all of which, unlike FB, I actually _do_ use) treat
clickbait, and how publishers optimize their own content.

The race to the bottom among aggregators, which started quite some time back
with HuffPo (nearly a decade old now) has become quite maddening. I've long
since resorted to flagging such content as spam, where possible (curious that
comments here suggest FB has an "I don't want to see this" option, G+ most
certainly doesn't), and increasingly have resorted to unfollowing or blocking
those who post such crud.

Much as xkcd suggested a format for getting bots to contribute usefully to
online forums, it would be quite slick if search and social engines would
reward actually _good_ and _quality_ content.

~~~
dublinben
I had to stop using Google Plus for just this reason. At some point they
decided to add a "hot" category of stories to your feed in the mobile app.
There was no way to disable this 'feature' or avoid these spammy stories while
still using the app. I can't say I've really missed much.

~~~
dredmorbius
I'm taking a bit of an enforced G+ holiday, and can't say I'm all that upset.

Search comprehensiveness and speed, the ease of interaction with the
Notifications pane, and a few interesting people. That's its upside.

Streams, circles, lack of filtering, overall layout, client bloat, privacy
invasion, crap and noise, annoyances across other Google properties: the
downsides.

Though I'm seriously wondering where the hell the smart people are these days.

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tinloaf
So now you can punish those annoying click-baits by clicking them and then
returning to facebook as fast as possible? Nice. Also, this could be used to
"punish" legit links someone does not like...

~~~
ghayes
This is generally where big data helps. Your click is one signal among
thousands of impressions / clicks. A single user's clicks shouldn't have a
large impact in the aggregate.

~~~
yanowitz
I think the argument is that bot-nets can appear to be 1000s of legitimate
users and you can use this to undermine competitors.

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the_watcher
I like this update. The legacy of BuzzFeed and Upworthy can live on with
click-bait in headlines and titles, but now, they'll have to be backed by
engaging content. The reason clickbait emerged is that those headlines were
engaging and interesting to people. It would be fascinating to go back to the
most egregious clickbait/low quality content examples and actually create the
content the headline teased.

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tripzilch
You won't _believe_ in what way this Twitter account is relevant to this
thread:
[https://twitter.com/SavedYouAClick](https://twitter.com/SavedYouAClick)

Ahem. Sorry :)

It "spoils" clickbaity links. I'm not entirely sure whether it's actually
_useful_ or time-saving, but I really do like the idea.

~~~
golergka
Whole article in a nutshell:

[https://twitter.com/SavedYouAClick/status/504230235458768896](https://twitter.com/SavedYouAClick/status/504230235458768896)
[https://twitter.com/SavedYouAClick/status/503974048356130816](https://twitter.com/SavedYouAClick/status/503974048356130816)

------
jgalt212
Definitely not good news for Chris Dixon and the other bubble inflators at
Andressen Horowitz.

Google Panda: Demand Media FB Feed Change: Buzzfeed

Of course, my thesis predicated upon the supposition that Buzzfeed is nothing
more than a clickbait farm. There are a significant minority who feel
otherwise, but I am not one of them.

~~~
eli
Especially in the last year or two, Buzzfeed has been mixing in genuine,
quality journalism with their listicles. For example
[http://www.buzzfeed.com/longform](http://www.buzzfeed.com/longform) and
[http://www.buzzfeed.com/politics](http://www.buzzfeed.com/politics)

I think Upworthy is the site that should be concerned: they have far less
original content and AFAIK the entire premise is based on social (facebook)
sharing.

~~~
jgalt212
that may be true. but can they get as good at genuine, quality journalism as
they are with clickbait?

and given the valuations quality journalism companies trade at these days,
maybe that's not something they want to devote serious efforts to.

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DanAndersen
I'd love to see some Clickbait filters similar to Bayesian spam filters. My
initial guess is that any headline with the word "this," second-person
pronouns, and future tense (e.g. "you won't believe this blah blah blah")
would rank highly.

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skeletonjelly
Aww. I guess this means I'll see less Clickhole in my feed.

~~~
dredmorbius
As I've commented on G+: the parody is too good. I flag that as spam along
with the real clickbait.

------
cliveowen
Anyone else wonders who are these people that answered their survey? I don't
know about you, but Facebook never asked me anything, let alone to compile a
survey. My guess is that these people are Facebook employees. What is wrong
with that, you ask? It's simple, Facebook is used by 1B+ people, so the
results from a survey answered by a few thousand doesn't tell you _anything_
about the general consensus. Even worse, you're only seeing what a very
specific niche wants: the American, mostly white, tech-minded portion of the
userbase. It's good dogfooding your products to root out bugs, but it's
downright reckless to use your own people to make assumptions over the needs
of the real user base.

~~~
astalwick
I think you're assuming an awful lot based on the fact that you haven't been
surveyed by Facebook.

Facebook has 1B+ people. Do you know how trivial it is for them to run
surveys? 100K population surveys, if they want? Many hundreds of them,
simultaneously?

I have no insight into how facebook manages its surveys, but I'd be surprised
if they didn't have some sort of generalized surveying platform built in to
facebook that allows product teams to independently survey more or less
anything they want.

