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News Feed FYI: Further Reducing Clickbait in Feed
- jackfrodo 10y ago> A team at Facebook reviewed thousands of headlines using these criteria, validating each other’s work to identify a large set of clickbait headlines. What a soul-crushing job that would be.
- pigscantfly 10y agoI'm extremely surprised they didn't outsource to Mechanical Turk or leverage their user base in some way for crowdsourcing the labels.
- darkstar999 10y agoThey may have. Did they release any technical details on this?
- riebschlager 10y agoIt was actually only number six on our top ten soul crushing jobs list. Number one will surprise you! Click here!
- lostgame 10y agoOwch. That was painfully good.
- gohrt 10y agoLooks boring, won't click Fun fact: https://medium.com/i-data/29-reasons-youre-reading-this-article-fbf4671327e3 https://medium.com/i-data/29-reasons-youre-reading-this-arti... "29 reasons you’re reading this article or why odd-length BuzzFeed listicles perform better than even ones"
- wldcordeiro 10y agoSeems like a similar thing to what goes behind pricing something as 1.99 instead of 2.00
- goodJobWalrus 10y ago> Looking at ten thousand published BuzzFeed listicles over a period of three months I found a statistically significant difference in the performance of odd-length listicles compared to even ones. They published at least 10,000 listicles in 3 months! now, that is what I call a soul-crushing job (writing those articles)
- goshx 10y ago- You wont believe how much money they make - Engineers are shocked with these results - Here is the top 10 headlines they found. #6 will make you cringe - The CEO wrote the sweetest message to them Perhaps they should simply ban buzzfeed or use all of their headlines as examples.
- pc86 10y ago> Perhaps they should simply ban buzzfeed What a kind, just world that would be.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- potatoyogurt 10y agoYou'd miss out on the handful of really good real journalism articles per month that Buzzfeed publishes in that case, which would be kind of a shame. Maybe that's how they justify the expense of doing real journalism -- it makes it harder for other sites to ban their domain.
- paulgb 10y agoHN bans buzzfeed submissions outright, but I would have loved to see the community's comments on this article, for example: https://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewrice/the-fall-of-intrade-and-the-business-of-betting-on-real-life https://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewrice/the-fall-of-intrade-and-...
- quotemstr 10y agoThanks. That was an interesting article. "Roman bookies ran numbers on the election of Renaissance popes until Gregory XIV banned the practice on penalty of excommunication. Around the turn of the 20th century, Wall Street brokers openly traded election futures and newspapers quoted their prices like modern opinion polls. Strumpf estimates that at the peak of this practice, in the election of 1916, around $10 million was bet on these markets — more than $200 million in today’s dollars. By the end of the New Deal era, though, the electoral markets had all but disappeared, due to both competition — modern polling pushed the betting lines out of the newspapers — and legal crackdowns."
- mcpherrinm 10y agoYou only really need a few seconds to classify a headline. Spending an afternoon classifying data with a few colleagues isn't the worst thing ever. You're making a big change to a system used by many millions of people. There's probably no easier way to validate your system is working as expected.
- Kiro 10y agoIf you call that a soul-crushing job you can't have had many bad jobs. Most people would only dream of a "fun" job like that.
- alanh 10y agoIt's also for a great cause :) that helps.
- themihai 10y agoIt may be fun for a few hours but reading clickbait headlines excessively is like eating vomit. I'm sure these people have quotas to meet so I doubt even more the "fun" element.
- lifeformed 10y agoIt would be fun designing a system that can automatically detect those headlines, using machine learning and whatever other tricks you can think of.
- rspeer 10y agoI have a heuristic that gets evaluated over time on randomly-sampled tweets. (It's the core of the Python "ftfy" package, which fixes Unicode mistakes based on a heuristic for whether text "looks right".) I frequently have to read the randomly-sampled tweets for debugging purposes. And, yes, random tweets are often so dumb that my brain slightly regrets the time it spent reading them. But that is far outweighed by the benefit that the Internet is delivering me fresh test data all the time. On the whole, I enjoy the notion that I am converting stupid babble into something somewhat useful.
- themihai 10y agoThat's different than reading randomly-sampled tweets or clickbait headlines all day long, is it? At FB(AFAIU) they have people doing just that which makes sense(to reduce costs) but it's a miserable job regardless the scope(i.e. to make more money for Facebook or help people who `friend` rough entities or both.)
- minimaxir 10y agoOver a year ago, I did a statistical analysis of BuzzFeed's clickbait (http://minimaxir.com/2015/01/linkbait/ http://minimaxir.com/2015/01/linkbait/) and found that it is highly formulaic. In fairness, the linkbait game has changed since then, with Medium posts using calls-to-actions and "just" needlessly in their headlines. Then again, with FB's machine learning expertise, I'm surprised they need a team to manually classify linkbait posts at all.
- room271 10y agoEven with expertise, you need labeling of some kind for supervised learning.
- AndrewKemendo 10y agoAnyone who has built a data set for machine learning systems (labeling images etc...) has done this. It's just part of the way you teach ANNs.
- erdevs 10y agoThis is often required work in supervised learning / any machine learning with labels. Sometimes you get better result with human judgment on the labels, and that means you have to grind through a meaningful corpus of data. If you believe what you're doing is important and beneficial, it doesn't feel like too much of a grind. Ultimately this was probably about a week of work, if every labeling participant independently reviewed ~3-5K articles. Some people might have chosen to mechanical turk this, or to gather feedback from a subset of users and use those labels. Doing that might be a better approach as it might not only be less labor-intensive up-front but also allow the system to be regularly retrained easily (ie by gathering new label information as clickbaiters inevitably try to adapt their headlines). I imagine there were reasons for starting off this way, though.
- room271 10y agoIndeed, I've seen at least one paper where they used Mecanical Turk and aggregated results (by showing the same examples to multiple people) to check for quality. It sounds like they did almost exactly the same thing here. Paper: 'Antisocial Behaviour In Online Discussion Communities' (Cheng et al., 2015) Link: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1504.00680v1.pdf http://arxiv.org/pdf/1504.00680v1.pdf (Search for 'Mechanical Turk' / section Data Preparation -> Measuring text quality.)
- haney 10y agoI find this really interesting, there are so many new 'media' companies that have popped up who have been able to grow because of the effectiveness of the "You won't believe what happened next" style headline, much like modern SEO has moved away from grey hat tactics and now seems to focus on "aligning content with Google's values" I hope that content producers start being rewarded for building great content that's good for users instead of writing click bait headlines.
- smacktoward 10y agoThe really fascinating bit is how transient that kind of growth has seemed to be. All it takes is FB tweaking their algorithms to close the hole you discovered and suddenly your growth story is over. So the key is to use the window of time you have to exploit the news feed to transform your company into something that doesn't need to do shabby things like exploiting the news feed to stay alive. If you just keep riding the same pony, FB will eventually shoot it dead under you. BuzzFeed is the one example I can think of of a company managing to use that transient effect as a sort of "booster stage" into becoming more of a general media organization, but there are plenty of others who failed to pull that transition off (Upworthy, ViralNova).
- sharkjacobs 10y agoI wonder if outlets like Buzzfeed will be able to do something like write Facebook specific headlines to get past the clickbait filter, while still using clickbaity headlines for the same stories other places
- cddotdotslash 10y agoThis is actually interesting. When Facebook determines the article title, their crawlers go out and pull down the page. It'd certainly be interesting to catch the user agent and present a different version if Facebook is detected.
- goshx 10y agoSomeone is probably writing you a job offer as I type this message
- haney 10y agoI've read that google penalizes users if they present a different version of the page to bots than end users (I guess they pretend to be a browser and access the page from an undisclosed IP). I'd be surprised if Facebook didn't do the same.
- honkhonkpants 10y agoPresenting different content to Google's spider vs. users' browsers is the kind of thing that will get you banned from Google. I wonder if Facebook has similar policies.
- Kadin 10y agoI believe that Google's crawler is designed to detect when it's being fed false information, and punishes pages accordingly for it. Wouldn't be hard for Facebook to do the same thing.
- jon-wood 10y agoYou don't have to do anything more than at some metadata to your page which Facebook will automatically use.
- ionforce 10y agoThank god.
- matt_wulfeck 10y agoI can't help but feel these engineering challenges will always be spinning their wheels against human nature. It's your "friends" -- after all -- who are sharing these stories. I guess it's easier for Facebook to fix its algorithm than for most of us to fix our friends.
- milcron 10y agoYou can also "like" pages and see content from non-friend organizations in your feed.
- Spellman 10y agoYeah, my general policy is if someone consistently posts stuff like this, either lower their frequency in my Feed or Unfollow altogether. Similarly, see memes. Been tempted to remove if they also consistently post severely biased sources, but then I'm culturing my own isolation bubble which I regularly rail against, thus guilting myself into tolerating and trying to understand these individuals.
- citizenkeen 10y agoHow do you lower someone's frequency in your feed?
- tomschlick 10y agohttps://www.facebook.com/help/745556738851537 https://www.facebook.com/help/745556738851537
- delecti 10y agoBefore lowering someone's frequency or unfollowing I hide all content from certain sources. My feed is entirely clear of HuffPo and Buzzfeed (neither is worth seeing the rare good content for all the clickbait), among many many other sources. Someone only gets unfollowed if they still manage to keep finding new annoying websites to post clickbait from.
- amyjess 10y ago
- ohitsdom 10y agoI wonder if this clickbait filter will also flag ironic blog titles. There have been a fair amount on HN that were clearly a joke, like "We ditched Postgres, what happened next will BLOW YOUR MIND".
- Kluny 10y agoHope so. I'm happy to be rid of ironic clickbait as well.
- minimaxir 10y agoI've seen a rise in HN submissions with linkbait titles which are not ironic, usually to Medium posts. The non-punishment of linkbait posts on Medium has made it a custom, which makes things worse, and it's good that Facebook is publically doing something about it.
- dsjoerg 10y agoThere must be people who not only click on the clickbait but then read and enjoy the article. Which is why I wish they had instead done a joint model of features of the user, the headline and the article to predict the likelihood that the user would quickly return to FB.
- tiles 10y agoOT: What is the distinction between "fb.com" and "facebook.com"?
- dkyc 10y agoThere is none! It's a redirect, afaik. Fun fact: They paid over $8M for to acquire the domain from the "American Farm Bureau Federation". [0] http://mashable.com/2011/01/11/facebook-paid-8-5-million-to-acquire-fb-com/ http://mashable.com/2011/01/11/facebook-paid-8-5-million-to-...
- rjuyal 10y agoFarm Bureau ( fbfs.com ) sold fb.com to Facebook few years back.
- baron816 10y agoGreat, but I'd rather them work on eliminating all the engagement/wedding photos from people I DON'T know from my newsfeed.
- clifanatic 10y agoI keep hoping for a "you should probably have realized by now that your baby is a lot uglier than you think" filter.
- donretag 10y agoI find it ironic considering the majority of clickbait articles that I encounter on Facebook are the sponsored posts. If FB was serious about clickbait, they should simply not accept money from such sites.
- erdevs 10y agoOne could cynically view this as an extractive measure, dressed as a user-friendly effort. In other words: Sorry, Mr. Publisher. Your most effective titles are going to be exposed less frequently for free in your audience's feeds. However, you can of course always promote your stories with whatever title you feel is most effective when exposed to users! wink
- Alex3917 10y ago> People have told us they like seeing authentic stories the most. That’s why we work hard to understand what type of stories and posts people consider genuine The secret of success is authenticity. Once you can fake that you've got it made.
- Yhippa 10y agoI just unfollowed BuzzFeed years ago. Problem solved.
- hkmurakami 10y agoThis reminds me of FB tacitly approving of those overly aggressive social game ads / updates for a while, until FB itself became strong enough to not need them anymore. It also reminds me of Twitter encouraging 3rd party developers, then cutting them off once they became strong enough to be alright without them. Clickbait articles surely padded FB's bottom line, but now that FB has become strong in the news feed / media source space, perhaps it feels that it can separate itself from the devil's bargain. Yes, I hate clickbait just as much as the next HN'er (and would like to not consider it in the same vein as Twitter API use), but putting aside the nature of the content, the power dynamics at play seem analogous.
- erdevs 10y agoYou're absolutely right that this is a similar dynamic. At this point this is FB's MO and you have to be a fool not to anticipate it as inevitable in each ecosystem/market they develop.
- johansch 10y agoThat's a weird analogy. It's not like there was a lack of content (good or bad) competing for attention before... I think a better analogy is "we have now implemented a spam filter. F U spammers."
- imjk 10y agoThey did the same thing with overly aggressive affiliate advertising in the past when the first opened up their self-serve advertising platform.
- startupdiscuss 10y agoJust deduct points from any article that uses these phrases: "... with this one weird trick..." "... you won't believe..." "... people are losing their minds about..." "... mind blowing pictures of..." "... what happens next..."
- criley2 10y agoI say yellow flag any post with a single or double digit number that doesn't meet date, currency, or other known formats. Not sure how else to capture one of their favorite forms of clickbait * " ## X you should be Ying" * " ## ways to make X hate you" * " ## times X made us laugh" * " ## times X was almost too X" * " ## things that make X say, "that's me" * " The hardest ## rounds of X you'll ever play" * " ## ways X you is the best you" * " ## animals that will make you say X" * " ## memes you'll only get if you did X" * " ## people you forgot were on TV show X" Note: all of these were taken from today's Buzzfeed.com front page
- quotemstr 10y agoThe beautiful thing about machine learning is that nobody needs to sit there and write these patterns. A system can learn from a training set much faster than you can write regular expressions and it can look at features of the text that never occur to you.
- ionforce 10y agoBut someone needs to make that training set.
- Houshalter 10y agoHumans can design good features for the ML algorithm to use though. A simple naive bayes filter, for instance, would not be able to learn these complicated patterns on it's own.
- quotemstr 10y ago
- artursapek 10y agoI wish they would open up a clickbait-score API so places like HN could benefit from their research, but I guess if they did then the perpetrators would use it to test work-arounds.
- erdevs 10y agoI'm curious why FB chose to manually label the data vs collecting feedback from users. Eg via a dialog on a large sample of users and articles asking whether the article was clickbait, or asking users to rate it, or some such. The benefits of this approach, besides a lesser degree of tedious manual data review and entry up-front, include: ease of retraining the system as clickbaiters inevitably adapt in this new arms race (can regularly gather fresh user feedback and feed the updated corpus and labels into the system), and perhaps also closer affinity with what users actually think qualifies as clickbait (as opposed to FB's internal definition). This soft of approach may also lead to more differentiated filtering on a personalized basis or an affinity-group basis... ie they'd have the opportunity to model user-behavior features and create differentiated filters based on user behavior/preferences. I'm sure there were very good reasons for going this way, so I'm not second-guessing. Just curious what the tradeoffs were in the decision, if any knows or can make educated speculation.
- heydenberk 10y agoIt would be gamed. The people who have the most incentive to take part in a "crowdsourced" labelling exercise to reduce clickbait are, of course, the people generating the clickbait.
- harigov 10y agoNot if they have no control over who is asked to label. You can evaluate how trustable labels are by manually reviewing few random ratings and extrapolating it on the entire population.
- chejazi 10y agoMost people don't consciously think "News Feed is full of clickbait"; instead they value the overall experience less, e.g. "I find News Feed less entertaining/worthwhile than BuzzFeed". They aren't aware of the curation going on under the hood, and soliciting feedback is considered more disruptive than anything.
- ben_jones 10y ago
- quotemstr 10y agoObligatory: https://larseidnes.com/2015/10/13/auto-generating-clickbait-with-recurrent-neural-networks/ https://larseidnes.com/2015/10/13/auto-generating-clickbait-...
- clifanatic 10y agoWhile they're at it, can they do something about the "slideshows" that consist of 8 sentences spread across 25 slides?
- ionforce 10y agoPublishers love this. Especially when it causes ads to reload between each click. While we're add it, why don't we add a special "ad slide" that's seamless.
- JackuB 10y ago"It is not a news story, but it is a slideshow" http://youtu.be/IVfslRsNXUc http://youtu.be/IVfslRsNXUc
- dougdonohoe 10y agoThis ... I ...
- dougdonohoe 10y agoTotally agree with ...
- dougdonohoe 10y ago... this sentiment.
- 0xCMP 10y agoWhats so horrible about them? I don't have to go anywhere off the site. I get the simple version of the story (which often times is instead a 500 word piece over explaining it) and it doesn't require sound.
- rdslw 10y agoA lot of 'relevant' 'authentic' 'genuine' words there. Yet I'm still afraid that this is sugar coated heroine. The very nature of facebook MUST induce "clickbaiting", if not in title one, then a stream-of-short-yet-another-video/picture/sillyarticle. It's because facebook is optimising news stream for TIME SPENT. The longer the better. Facebook must optimise for it because: * facebook income is directly corelated with time spent, as time spent is corelated with number of ads shown * the longer time spent the bigger user retention in long run, which simply is fb goal. So human/fb relation is screwed no matter what authentic, genuine PR will be written about it :(
- stevebmark 10y agoYou created this monster, Facebook. You did this.
- tomjen3 10y agoAwesome. I didn't realize how bad clickbait had gotten until I subscribed to the Economist for a short while - I could just scroll through its articles, read the title and subtitle and know what the article was about and in most cases it wasn't something I needed to read. Hn could do its readers a huge service here by requiring descriptive headlines, instead of the current rule about not changing the headlines. Even better would be adding a 30-50 word summary under the article.
- Magi604 10y agoWhile we're talking about the FB news feed, I'll plug the FB Purity extension for Chrome. It's a really wonderful extension that lets you customize what you can see on your feed from the content to the layout.
- mrep 10y agoI'll wait to see it before I believe it. They also said they were going to crack down on people ripping each others videos off and yet I still see that happening all the time.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- sevenless 10y agoClickbait is just a conspicuous example of a more general problem: sensational and scaremongering news there is no conceivable benefit in knowing. This category encompasses most political news, and the daily litany of misery, crime and terrorism that fills the headlines. I think FB should filter it all out, and stop news organizations lining their pockets by making us unhappy.
- gedrap 10y agoIt's just that it's very hard to determine what's 'wrong' and what's not, other than very extreme cases and even then you might disagree. Banning some media because you don't consider right/worthy/beneficial/whatever doesn't help with free speech at all. Imagine someone banning Justin Bieber music because it's not 'worth listening', or banning some books because they have no value. That's a bit absurd.
- sevenless 10y agoThe way Facebook chooses articles for its feed has no effect on anyone's free speech. Comparing it to banning books is silly.
- JackuB 10y agoThis always depends on which receing end you are. If your book/blog/status is being _hidden_ by newsfeed, then you'll be screaming for freedom of speech and fairness in how people see their newsfeed and to let them decide what is worthy of their attention.
- thoughtPolize 10y ago"Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks" [0] "Was it funded by the US army? First the university said yes" it's US led information warfare [1] [0] http://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.full http://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.full [1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/head-quarters/2014/jul/01/facebook-cornell-study-emotional-contagion-ethics-breach https://www.theguardian.com/science/head-quarters/2014/jul/0...
- jeena 10y agoI think it is a good thing for all three groups: facebook itself, because I might start using it a bit more; the users, I get the info I want, friends and family stories; and the news sites, they will be able to concentrate on the open web again instead of giving more and more power to facebook.
- mrbill 10y agoThose click bait and fake news sites can be a pain. About a month ago, I discovered that one of them had taken a pic of me and used it in an article about a Canadian guy with a micropenis being denied euthanasia (!). Through reverse image search and other tools, I found that at least five other sites had copied the article and pic verbatim. Took over a week of sending DMCA requests to get all of them removed.
- mrbill 10y agoBTW I found the article in the first place when it came up on a friend's FB feed, he recognized the picture, and let me know.
- mattfrommars 10y agoFacebook shouldn't be deciding what people read which they seem to be trying to do and people don't find it odd. If people click on clickbait, it genuinely means they are interested in it. The people who don't could just visit news site like Al Jazzera, NBC etc. It like banning ads because people are clicking in irrelevant things. I'm going Facebook applies click bait algorithm to there Facebook ads ;)
- mattfrommars 10y agoFacebook shouldn't be deciding what people read which they seem to be trying to do and people don't find it odd. If people click on clickbait, it genuinely means they are interested in it. The people who don't could just visit news site like Al Jazzera, NBC etc. It like banning ads because people are clicking in irrelevant things. I think it's save to assume Facebook will apply click bait algorithm to there Facebook ads considering they want their users to have a positive experience ;)
- cvs268 10y agoSo, now that FB has "muscled-in" into the lives of most consumers, it is in a strong position to employ the classic protection racket with the producers. Businesses that do not engage with FB or do NOT pay FB "protection money" will see a gradual drop in their consumer engagement online. FB will gladly "nudge" the consumers in the direction of the businesses who pay FB.
- artur_makly 10y agospeaking of market / social manipulation , i had a crazy thought last night.. could FB reduce ISIS terrorism by radicalized moles by carefully saturating their feeds with enough anti-extremism education videos?