World’s largest social network, Facebook, is plagued with clickbait titles by blogs and media corporations trying to lure people and increase views on their articles or productions. Facebook did modify its algorithm to tweak news feed and reduce the irrelevant contents, but the changes really didn’t make an impact.
The California-based social networking site has now released an update that aims to tone down clickbait titles and show you the most relevant content. Facebook executives claim that their main aim is to rank content and provide the best experience to its users.
You might see statements like “…And what happens next is hard to believe”, “..And you’ll get shocked by what you see!”, “..And his reaction was priceless” and “…You cannot guess what happened next.” in article and video titles that have regular content but the creators are trying to increase the views on their piece of work.
This is a very smart, and annoying, strategy adopted by content producers these days, and people often fall into the trap, finding themselves irritated by the content. This often leads to poor user experience on the news feed, directly affecting Facebook’s user engagement.
“To address this feedback from our community, we’re making an update to News Feed ranking to further reduce clickbait headlines in the coming weeks. With this update, people will see fewer clickbait stories and more of the stories they want to see higher up in their feeds,” the blog post mentions.
How is Facebook modifying its algorithm?
We regularly see pages with clickbait titles and posts and more often than not, end up closing Facebook altogether. Their older algorithm might have worked for a few, but overall the update wasn’t any promising. With this new update, Facebook is finally doing what we had hoped from them.
Now the company will scan specific clickbait titles, or identify titles that look like clickbaits and categorize them. Now there are two broad key points that Facebook will look into while deciding the relevance of the article –
- Does the article contain what it says in the headline? Is the information complete and relevant?
- Is the information provided exaggerated and is the title misleading?
So the next time you see an article saying “Do not go running in the morning because..”, do not click it just because it’s stating something readers might not know. In fact in most cases, you will already have knowledge about the conclusions, and you’ll end up wasting your time. If the article has content that is completely exaggerated and focuses on just one point which is irrelevant, Facebook will be removing the content from your feed.
This algorithm is what spam email filters also do, that look out for suspicious titles and block malicious content. The company will look at the title as well as the content through this algorithm and make sure you get the best content on your news feed.
Will this actually help?
To be honest, spam filters have worked wonders for me 99% of the time and they keep irrelevant mails in the spam box. Yes, sometimes emails might get mixed up, but errors are bound to happen anywhere.
This new algorithm from Facebook is what users had actually expected the first time, but probably was taking the company longer to implement. This definitely looks promising and interesting because not only with clickbait articles have lower rankings, their pages will automatically be affected.
Facebook clarifies that once the page stops making articles with clickbait titles and irrelevant content, this algorithm won’t rank them lower than before. Our news feed is already filled with so many things, we believe this will help reduce the clutter and clean the content.
The rollout has already started, so let us know in the comments section if you see any visible changes in the quality of the news feed now.
Source: Facebook
