Read This Now: Two Reasons Why Facebook Wants to Fix Obnoxious Headlines - Truthdig
Through the perverse economics of Internet journalism, Facebook has
become essential to the revenue of virtually every publication,
including this one. So the social network’s promise to cut down on spammy, deceptive posts has many sites atwitter:
“Click-baiting” is when a publisher posts a link with a
headline that encourages people to click to see more, without telling
them much information about what they will see. Posts like these tend to
get a lot of clicks, which means that these posts get shown to more
people, and get shown higher up in News Feed.
However, when we asked people in an initial survey what type of
content they preferred to see in their News Feeds, 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.
The company says it will monitor users’ behavior in order to evaluate
the value of the content they click away to. So if you leave and come
right back, Facebook will deduce that you were duped by a shifty
headline, and populate fewer news feeds with that particular story.
