Facebook has made yet another change to its News Feed in order to reduce the amount of "spam" in your news feed.
As with previous changes, this one is intended to reduce the amount of useless nonsense you see on Facebook and increase the amount of genuinely interesting stuff you want from the people you follow.
From now on, Facebook will discriminate against "like-baiting" posts that gather clicks by simply requesting a "like" as the obvious answer to a question everyone already agrees on.
The company provided this screenshot of the kind of spam it is trying to get rid of:
The company said:
Today we are announcing a series of improvements to News Feed to reduce stories that people frequently tell us are spammy and that they don’t want to see. Many of these stories are published by Pages that deliberately try and game News Feed to get more distribution than they normally would.
... “Like-baiting” is when a post explicitly asks News Feed readers to like, comment or share the post in order to get additional distribution beyond what the post would normally receive.
Today's moves will also reduce content that is posted repeatedly by the same account, and "spam" links that are misleading, or lead only to ads.
The moves come as Facebook wages a war on low-quality content. Advertisers have complained bitterly that their posts can no longer be seen by their fans, as Facebook has reduced their reach to as little as 2% of their Facebook fan audience.
From Facebook's point of view, these advertisers' reach has only been reduced because their posts were so boring that none of their own fans wanted to engage with them. Exhibit A in this war is Eat24, which deleted its Facebook page in a protest over its reduced reach. Ironically, its last blog post — a breakup letter to Facebook — went viral the way none of its regular posts did.
