When Facebook announces that they are making changes and improvements, most will think of security issues and added clutter. But in an announcement Monday, it seems Facebook is looking to reduce the clutter that we see.
One of the ways that Facebook plans on doing this, is to reduce the amount of click-baiting headlines on News Feed. As for click-baiting, Facebook announces that:
?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 the News Feed.?
So it seems Facebook is looking to save us from wasting our time clicking through useless links, in hopes of finding out what one celebrity supposedly said about the Pope. And you know these headlines and links are out there, as reported by The Daily Beast.
Even more importantly, users should be able to actually see information about what they are about to click on. Regarding these ?mysterious? headlines, CNN says:
?These sorts of headlines have proliferated in the past couple of years because Internet publishers have found that they help boost page views and, consequently, revenues from advertising. But critics of the style- – and there are a lot of them- – say it’s cheap and fundamentally unsatisfying to users.?
While this type of move may decrease the amount of traffic some publishers are used to seeing, let’s hope it will increase the quality of information one gets, when clicking on a story they look forward to reading.
Let us know your thoughts at the Liberal America Facebook page. Sign up for our free daily newsletter to receive more great stories like this one.
