Ask HN: "Like if you support [obvious cause]"

[gadders]

Lately my facebook feed seems to have been taken over by pictures of maltreated dogs/brave soldiers/ill children with text along the lines of "Click like if you support [thing in picture]. Keep scrolling if you [hate soldiers/beat animals/want more kids to get cancer]".

Apart from obviously needing a better class of friends, is there a business model here? Are the people that run these annoying pages making money off the back of the "likes" that they manipulate people into?

[dholowiski]

it's SEO, plain and simple. Facebook doesn't show you everything all of your friends say, it uses 'edge rank' - a complex algorithm - to choose what gets shown and what gets hidden. There is much speculation around what the actual inputs are, but no doubt that likes are taken into account.

So, someone who posted something with 1 million likes is more likely to have a better edge rank and you're more likely to see things from them in the future.