Facebook Updates News Feed To Weed Out Clickbait

If there's one type of story in my Facebook feed that will get me to unfollow a page, or use the "hide post" feature, it's a clickbait title. Basically anything with "one trick" or "you'll never believe number 4!" in the title gets removed from my feed. Well as it turns out, I might not need to keep doing that much longer.

For a site like Facebook to stay relevant, they have to continually evolve their service, and what they display. The company has been polling over a thousand people per day, to see what they think of the stories that show up in their feed. This allows them to determine how much people actually care about the stories that show up, regardless of whether or not they clicked on them.

They plan on taking this data, and combining it with the types of stories you click on, share, like, and comment on. The hope is that by putting these bits of information together, that they will be able to better determine what stories they serve to you at the top of your news feed.

While they didn't come out and say it in their recent announcement, it sounds to me as if they're wanting to cut down on the amount of clickbait stories that show up. These are the stories that people click on, only to regret it almost immediately after loading up a terrible website filled with ugly slideshows and tons of ads.

If that really is what Facebook is trying to do, then they have my full support.

Source: Facebook