
News Feed FYI: Further Reducing Clickbait in Feed - frostmatthew
http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2016/08/news-feed-fyi-further-reducing-clickbait-in-feed/
======
hkmurakami
This reminds me of FB tacitly approving of those overly aggressive social game
ads / updates for a while, until FB itself became strong enough to not need
them anymore.

It also reminds me of Twitter encouraging 3rd party developers, then cutting
them off once they became strong enough to be alright without them.

Clickbait articles surely padded FB's bottom line, but now that FB has become
strong in the news feed / media source space, perhaps it feels that it can
separate itself from the devil's bargain.

Yes, I hate clickbait just as much as the next HN'er (and would like to not
consider it in the same vein as Twitter API use), but putting aside the
_nature of the content_ , the power dynamics at play seem analogous.

~~~
downandout
You're right that Facebook is starting to exercise its strength in unhealthy
ways, using companies until they decide to discard them. Most of these
clickbait sites are getting traffic by paying celebrities to post the articles
on their Facebook pages, cutting FB out of the revenue loop (example: [1]
data: [2]). They have come to realize that they aren't going to get these
companies to pay their extortionate rates for boosting page posts, so now they
are moving to crush them instead. While this specific move may turn out to be
a net positive for users, they are sending a clear message: pay us or we'll
kill your business.

Facebook's behavior is getting more and more territorial, anti-competitive,
and revenue driven. They are turning into the scary behemoth that many people
feared they would.

[1]
[https://www.facebook.com/georgehtakei](https://www.facebook.com/georgehtakei)

[2] [https://medium.com/@jbialer/influencers-partnerships-are-
vir...](https://medium.com/@jbialer/influencers-partnerships-are-viral-
steroids-bad62ae5320a#.aj326xzaz)

~~~
eatbitseveryday
> Facebook's behavior is getting more and more territorial, anti-competitive,
> and revenue driven. They are turning into the scary behemoth that many
> people feared they would.

I do not fear whatever Facebook turns into because I can decide to stop using
it. If they want to continue doing evil things, I can stop logging in, no? Why
would someone fear that FB is turning into something?

~~~
downandout
Let's say you run a restaurant. Facebook decides that they aren't getting
enough money from local restaurants, and thus choose to greatly reduce the
exposure of content that users share with their friends about restaurants that
aren't paying them. You aren't even a Facebook user, but your competitors are
and do pay them. Mentions of their restaurants actually get higher visibility
than normal content and go viral, while mentions of your restaurant get no
exposure at all. Your restaurant dies, while your competitors thrive.

It doesn't matter if you log in or not. Facebook policies can affect the
fortunes of nearly every type of business.

~~~
cortesoft
This seems like basic market economics at work; as a restaurant owner, you
have to make a choice - do I make more money back by paying Facebook their fee
or by not paying them. If the answer is that I make more by paying them, then
obviously they are providing a service that is worth what they are charging.
If not, then it is not worth it and you don't pay it.

I am really struggling to see the problem with what you describe; how is it
any different that advertising anywhere else? You decide if the cost of the ad
is worth the ROI. Part of that decision includes knowing that your competitors
might also advertise.

Does Pepsi get mad that Coke spends millions of dollars on Super Bowl
commercials so they have to, too?

~~~
gruez
>I am really struggling to see the problem with what you describe; how is it
any different that advertising anywhere else?

Facebook holds a near monopoly on social networks, and it's exploiting that to
extract rents in the form of advertising

------
sevenless
Clickbait is just a conspicuous example of a more general problem: sensational
and scaremongering news there is no conceivable benefit in knowing. This
category encompasses most political news, and the daily litany of misery,
crime and terrorism that fills the headlines. I think FB should filter it all
out, and stop news organizations lining their pockets by making us unhappy.

~~~
gedrap
It's just that it's very hard to determine what's 'wrong' and what's not,
other than very extreme cases and even then you might disagree. Banning some
media because you don't consider right/worthy/beneficial/whatever doesn't help
with free speech at all.

Imagine someone banning Justin Bieber music because it's not 'worth
listening', or banning some books because they have no value. That's a bit
absurd.

~~~
sevenless
The way Facebook chooses articles for its feed has no effect on anyone's free
speech. Comparing it to banning books is silly.

~~~
thoughtPolize
"Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social
networks" [0]

"Was it funded by the US army? First the university said yes" it's US led
information warfare [1]

[0]
[http://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.full](http://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.full)
[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/science/head-
quarters/2014/jul/0...](https://www.theguardian.com/science/head-
quarters/2014/jul/01/facebook-cornell-study-emotional-contagion-ethics-breach)

------
erdevs
I'm curious why FB chose to manually label the data vs collecting feedback
from users. Eg via a dialog on a large sample of users and articles asking
whether the article was clickbait, or asking users to rate it, or some such.

The benefits of this approach, besides a lesser degree of tedious manual data
review and entry up-front, include: ease of retraining the system as
clickbaiters inevitably adapt in this new arms race (can regularly gather
fresh user feedback and feed the updated corpus and labels into the system),
and perhaps also closer affinity with what _users_ actually think qualifies as
clickbait (as opposed to FB's internal definition). This soft of approach may
also lead to more differentiated filtering on a personalized basis or an
affinity-group basis... ie they'd have the opportunity to model user-behavior
features and create differentiated filters based on user behavior/preferences.

I'm sure there were very good reasons for going this way, so I'm not second-
guessing. Just curious what the tradeoffs were in the decision, if any knows
or can make educated speculation.

~~~
chejazi
Most people don't consciously think "News Feed is full of clickbait"; instead
they value the overall experience less, e.g. "I find News Feed less
entertaining/worthwhile than BuzzFeed". They aren't aware of the curation
going on under the hood, and soliciting feedback is considered more disruptive
than anything.

~~~
erdevs
I can see that as a reasonable concern. Two points though:

1\. Speaking personally as a user, I wouldn't mind this a bit. And would
actually love the ability to provide feedback more readily. I often hate the
content of my feed and I would feel much better if it seemed like I had
greater input on its filtering.

2\. Whether gathering feedback has a negative effect or not seems like a
testable hypothesis and this could be tried and measured, rather than simply
speculated about.

Given the above, I'm not sure if this would be a rigorous rationale for
avoiding the active feedback experiment.

~~~
Domenic_S
re: #1, you can. Each post on your feed has a "show less like this" option on
it.

------
clifanatic
While they're at it, can they do something about the "slideshows" that consist
of 8 sentences spread across 25 slides?

~~~
dougdonohoe
This ... I ...

~~~
dougdonohoe
Totally agree with ...

~~~
dougdonohoe
... this sentiment.

------
matt_wulfeck
I can't help but feel these engineering challenges will always be spinning
their wheels against human nature. It's your "friends" \-- after all -- who
are sharing these stories.

I guess it's easier for Facebook to fix its algorithm than for most of us to
fix our friends.

~~~
Spellman
Yeah, my general policy is if someone consistently posts stuff like this,
either lower their frequency in my Feed or Unfollow altogether.

Similarly, see memes.

Been tempted to remove if they also consistently post severely biased sources,
but then I'm culturing my own isolation bubble which I regularly rail against,
thus guilting myself into tolerating and trying to understand these
individuals.

~~~
citizenkeen
How do you lower someone's frequency in your feed?

~~~
tomschlick
[https://www.facebook.com/help/745556738851537](https://www.facebook.com/help/745556738851537)

------
haney
I find this really interesting, there are so many new 'media' companies that
have popped up who have been able to grow because of the effectiveness of the
"You won't believe what happened next" style headline, much like modern SEO
has moved away from grey hat tactics and now seems to focus on "aligning
content with Google's values" I hope that content producers start being
rewarded for building great content that's good for users instead of writing
click bait headlines.

~~~
smacktoward
The really fascinating bit is how transient that kind of growth has seemed to
be. All it takes is FB tweaking their algorithms to close the hole you
discovered and suddenly your growth story is over. So the key is to use the
window of time you have to exploit the news feed to transform your company
into something that doesn't need to do shabby things like exploiting the news
feed to stay alive. If you just keep riding the same pony, FB will eventually
shoot it dead under you.

BuzzFeed is the one example I can think of of a company managing to use that
transient effect as a sort of "booster stage" into becoming more of a general
media organization, but there are plenty of others who failed to pull that
transition off (Upworthy, ViralNova).

------
jackfrodo
> A team at Facebook reviewed thousands of headlines using these criteria,
> validating each other’s work to identify a large set of clickbait headlines.

What a soul-crushing job that would be.

~~~
riebschlager
It was actually only number six on our top ten soul crushing jobs list. Number
one will surprise you! Click here!

~~~
gohrt
Looks boring, won't click

Fun fact:

[https://medium.com/i-data/29-reasons-youre-reading-this-
arti...](https://medium.com/i-data/29-reasons-youre-reading-this-article-
fbf4671327e3) "29 reasons you’re reading this article or why odd-length
BuzzFeed listicles perform better than even ones"

~~~
goodJobWalrus
> Looking at ten thousand published BuzzFeed listicles over a period of three
> months I found a statistically significant difference in the performance of
> odd-length listicles compared to even ones.

They published at least 10,000 listicles in 3 months! now, that is what I call
a soul-crushing job (writing those articles)

------
sharkjacobs
I wonder if outlets like Buzzfeed will be able to do something like write
Facebook specific headlines to get past the clickbait filter, while still
using clickbaity headlines for the same stories other places

~~~
cddotdotslash
This is actually interesting. When Facebook determines the article title,
their crawlers go out and pull down the page. It'd certainly be interesting to
catch the user agent and present a different version if Facebook is detected.

~~~
haney
I've read that google penalizes users if they present a different version of
the page to bots than end users (I guess they pretend to be a browser and
access the page from an undisclosed IP). I'd be surprised if Facebook didn't
do the same.

------
startupdiscuss
Just deduct points from any article that uses these phrases:

"... with this one weird trick..."

"... you won't believe..."

"... people are losing their minds about..."

"... mind blowing pictures of..."

"... what happens next..."

~~~
criley2
I say yellow flag any post with a single or double digit number that doesn't
meet date, currency, or other known formats. Not sure how else to capture one
of their favorite forms of clickbait

* " ## X you should be Ying"

* " ## ways to make X hate you"

* " ## times X made us laugh"

* " ## times X was almost too X"

* " ## things that make X say, "that's me"

* " The hardest ## rounds of X you'll ever play"

* " ## ways X you is the best you"

* " ## animals that will make you say X"

* " ## memes you'll only get if you did X"

* " ## people you forgot were on TV show X"

Note: all of these were taken from today's Buzzfeed.com front page

~~~
quotemstr
The beautiful thing about machine learning is that nobody needs to sit there
and write these patterns. A system can learn from a training set much faster
than you can write regular expressions and it can look at features of the text
that never occur to you.

~~~
Houshalter
Humans can design good features for the ML algorithm to use though. A simple
naive bayes filter, for instance, would not be able to learn these complicated
patterns on it's own.

~~~
quotemstr
> Humans can design good features for the ML algorithm to use though

For now. Articles like [1] make me wonder whether this current generation of
programmers might be the last.

[1] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.04474](https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.04474)

------
Magi604
While we're talking about the FB news feed, I'll plug the FB Purity extension
for Chrome. It's a really wonderful extension that lets you customize what you
can see on your feed from the content to the layout.

------
tomjen3
Awesome. I didn't realize how bad clickbait had gotten until I subscribed to
the Economist for a short while - I could just scroll through its articles,
read the title and subtitle and know what the article was about and in most
cases it wasn't something I needed to read.

Hn could do its readers a huge service here by requiring descriptive
headlines, instead of the current rule about not changing the headlines. Even
better would be adding a 30-50 word summary under the article.

------
dsjoerg
There must be people who not only click on the clickbait but then read and
enjoy the article.

Which is why I wish they had instead done a joint model of features of the
user, the headline and the article to predict the likelihood that the user
would quickly return to FB.

------
quotemstr
Obligatory: [https://larseidnes.com/2015/10/13/auto-generating-
clickbait-...](https://larseidnes.com/2015/10/13/auto-generating-clickbait-
with-recurrent-neural-networks/)

------
rdslw
A lot of 'relevant' 'authentic' 'genuine' words there. Yet I'm still afraid
that this is sugar coated heroine. The very nature of facebook MUST induce
"clickbaiting", if not in title one, then a stream-of-short-yet-another-
video/picture/sillyarticle.

It's because facebook is optimising news stream for TIME SPENT. The longer the
better. Facebook must optimise for it because:

* facebook income is directly corelated with time spent, as time spent is corelated with number of ads shown

* the longer time spent the bigger user retention in long run, which simply is fb goal.

So human/fb relation is screwed no matter what authentic, genuine PR will be
written about it :(

------
ohitsdom
I wonder if this clickbait filter will also flag ironic blog titles. There
have been a fair amount on HN that were clearly a joke, like "We ditched
Postgres, what happened next will BLOW YOUR MIND".

~~~
minimaxir
I've seen a rise in HN submissions with linkbait titles which are _not_
ironic, usually to Medium posts.

The non-punishment of linkbait posts on Medium has made it a _custom_ , which
makes things worse, and it's good that Facebook is publically doing something
about it.

------
donretag
I find it ironic considering the majority of clickbait articles that I
encounter on Facebook are the sponsored posts. If FB was serious about
clickbait, they should simply not accept money from such sites.

~~~
erdevs
One could cynically view this as an extractive measure, dressed as a user-
friendly effort. In other words:

Sorry, Mr. Publisher. Your most effective titles are going to be exposed less
frequently for free in your audience's feeds. However, you can of course
always promote your stories with whatever title you feel is most effective
when exposed to users! _wink_

------
Alex3917
> People have told us they like seeing authentic stories the most. That’s why
> we work hard to understand what type of stories and posts people consider
> genuine

The secret of success is authenticity. Once you can fake that you've got it
made.

------
artursapek
I wish they would open up a clickbait-score API so places like HN could
benefit from their research, but I guess if they did then the perpetrators
would use it to test work-arounds.

------
mrep
I'll wait to see it before I believe it.

They also said they were going to crack down on people ripping each others
videos off and yet I still see that happening all the time.

------
cvs268
So, now that FB has "muscled-in" into the lives of most consumers, it is in a
strong position to employ the classic protection racket with the producers.

Businesses that do not engage with FB or do NOT pay FB "protection money" will
see a gradual drop in their consumer engagement online. FB will gladly "nudge"
the consumers in the direction of the businesses who pay FB.

------
mrbill
Those click bait and fake news sites can be a pain. About a month ago, I
discovered that one of them had taken a pic of me and used it in an article
about a Canadian guy with a micropenis being denied euthanasia (!).

Through reverse image search and other tools, I found that at least five other
sites had copied the article and pic verbatim.

Took over a week of sending DMCA requests to get all of them removed.

~~~
mrbill
BTW I found the article in the first place when it came up on a friend's FB
feed, he recognized the picture, and let me know.

------
Yhippa
I just unfollowed BuzzFeed years ago. Problem solved.

------
jeena
I think it is a good thing for all three groups: facebook itself, because I
might start using it a bit more; the users, I get the info I want, friends and
family stories; and the news sites, they will be able to concentrate on the
open web again instead of giving more and more power to facebook.

------
mattfrommars
Facebook shouldn't be deciding what people read which they seem to be trying
to do and people don't find it odd.

If people click on clickbait, it genuinely means they are interested in it.
The people who don't could just visit news site like Al Jazzera, NBC etc.

It like banning ads because people are clicking in irrelevant things.

I think it's save to assume Facebook will apply click bait algorithm to there
Facebook ads considering they want their users to have a positive experience
;)

------
mattfrommars
Facebook shouldn't be deciding what people read which they seem to be trying
to do and people don't find it odd.

If people click on clickbait, it genuinely means they are interested in it.
The people who don't could just visit news site like Al Jazzera, NBC etc.

It like banning ads because people are clicking in irrelevant things. I'm
going Facebook applies click bait algorithm to there Facebook ads ;)

------
artur_makly
speaking of market / social manipulation , i had a crazy thought last night..
could FB reduce ISIS terrorism by radicalized moles by carefully saturating
their feeds with enough anti-extremism education videos?

------
stevebmark
You created this monster, Facebook. You did this.

------
ionforce
Thank god.

------
baron816
Great, but I'd rather them work on eliminating all the engagement/wedding
photos from people I DON'T know from my newsfeed.

~~~
clifanatic
I keep hoping for a "you should probably have realized by now that your baby
is a lot uglier than you think" filter.

------
tiles
OT: What is the distinction between "fb.com" and "facebook.com"?

~~~
dkyc
There is none! It's a redirect, afaik. Fun fact: They paid over $8M for to
acquire the domain from the "American Farm Bureau Federation".

[0] [http://mashable.com/2011/01/11/facebook-paid-8-5-million-
to-...](http://mashable.com/2011/01/11/facebook-paid-8-5-million-to-acquire-
fb-com/)

