Again, major changes for Facebook. Following recent changes in its privacy setting, this time Facebook cleans up the News Feed to get rid of spammy posts and behavior.
Software engineer Erich Owens and product manager Chris Turitzin wrote in a recent blog post that a spammy post or a spam behavior falls into three general categories: link-baiting, frequently circulated content and spammy links. They went on to explain the behavior in detail.
By link-baiting, the company refers to a post that openly asks readers to hit like, post a comment or share the post. These open requests receive additional distribution outside of what they would usually receive.
The blog post also revealed that company surveys show that like-baiting stories have been discovered to be 15 percent less significant than stories with a similar number of likes, shares and comments. This results in a less-enjoyable experience for its users, the company said.
The changes that Facebook has been rolling out will detect these kinds of stories and prevent them from showing up prominently in the News Feed, thus making relevant stories stand out more. The update on this will not affect all Pages,c especially those onsidered to be honestly encouraging conversation among other readers or fans, but rather will affect Pages that have frequent posts that are openly requesting likes, shares and comments.
Frequently circulated content, meanwhile, pertains to pages and people repeatedly re-sharing great content -- literally the same content, over and over again. Facebook said people found repeated content to be less relevant, resulting in complaints about the Pages frequently posting them.
"We are improving News Feed to de-emphasize these Pages, and our early testing shows that this change causes people to hide 10% fewer stories from Pages overall," the blog post said.
Spammy links are posts that trick people into clicking on them, a move which, in turn, bring users to a website full of ads or a website with a mix of ads and often-circulated content. The blog post cited an example: stories or posts that claim to link to a photo album but, in truth, lure the viewer to a website full of ads.
The company likewise shared how it has detected spammy links among many other posts on the platform: by taking measurements on how frequently users who click and visit a link indicate they like the original post and share it among their friends.
Facebook also conducted an early test and found an interesting improvement:
"... we've seen a 5% increase in people on Facebook clicking on links that take them off of Facebook," it revealed.
It further said the figure is a big increase and a good sign that people on Facebook find the remaining content in their News Feed to be more significant and trustworthy.
Facebook said the majority of Page publishers would not be affected by these changes since they do not post feed spam, and to those who do, they will see a decrease in their distribution in the next few months.
Some users and critics said the surveys might not speak for all users, who have various opinions on what exactly spam is or what they like to see or not to see on Facebook. In short, what may be spam for Facebook and for other users may be acceptable reading for a few.
