Welcome news from the social media / tech world: Facebook announced in a Monday post that it had declared war on “click-bait” headlines, which internet publications, journals of letters, and chronicles of canine and feline events have used for years to entice web traffic.
The Facebook update is “to help people find the posts and links from publishers that are most interesting and relevant, and to continue to weed out stories that people frequently tell us are spammy and that they don’t want to see,” the company wrote in a note.
“[W]hen 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,” Facebook’s Khalid El-Arini and Joyce Tang wrote. “Over time, stories with ‘click-bait’ headlines can drown out content from friends and Pages that people really care about.”
Facebook here is drawing a distinction between headlines that entice people to read once they’ve clicked and headlines that entice people just to click. To reduce the prominence of posts in news feeds that aim for and / or accomplish the latter, Facebook said it will begin to “start taking into account whether people tend to spend time away from Facebook after clicking a link.” If they do, it’s the type of content “that people really care about.” If they don’t and they come right back to Facebook after clicking, it’s not, and the post will be ranked lower in News Feed.
Facebook said it will also begin to evaluate the ratio of users clicking to users engaging (liking, commenting, sharing) in determining how to rank a post.
Even in my 20s, I’m admittedly “old school” on matters of headline writing. It used to be a plain task of the newspaper’s copy desk, or a fun activity to get the readership talking (a la the New York Post). Neither of these approaches, however, indicate the function of a headline on the Internet: an invitation to a reader. In print publications, a headline is placed above or amid content, and thus is not a door a reader has to walk through to get to a story. On the web, it is. A headline is a summer employee standing on the side of the road performing an outrageous dance to draw attention to himself and holding a sign that says, “OIL CHANGE ONLY $15: TURN RIGHT HERE.” On the web, a headline is by its very nature obnoxious.
It’s relieving to see Facebook at least make an effort to encourage headlines that seemingly will reward clever writing just descriptive enough to tease a story but not give it away — something tasteful — instead of writing just desperate enough to impel a click. Rewarding the latter has done too much to turn web journalism into a game of psychology.
