Facebook is at it again! In its newfound quest for quality, the social network aims to clear newsfeeds of what it considers clickbait headlines, which are captions designed to lure readers in.
Lure them in by giving as little as possible as an encouragement to click through.
You may have seen countless such headlines online — the Internet is rife with them. Titles like “one weird trick to this” and “ten ways to that”, even lines like “you’ll never guess what”. Sometimes the content is worth it, sure, but all too often it is tabloid style pointless or downright misleading.
People, undoubtedly, are annoyed by this, and now Facebook is taking it upon itself to take a stand, clear up the clogged newsfeeds and limit the appearances of such articles and headlines.
The company announced this along with another policy change:
“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.”
So Facebook will be clamping down on clickbait articles that are created to encourage clicking. These new algorithms will monitor how long people spend time on a site after clicking a link. A short visit means the link was probably useless.
The number of shares an article receives also determines its real worth.
Oh, and the second update has got to do with articles that have linked embedded titles or images. Meaning content that is clear and easily decipherable will float to the top more readily.
Quality content, once again, rules the roost.