Other factors, such as how much time people spent reading an article after clicking on it, also contributed to Facebook’s clickbait calculations.
Thursday’s announcement goes a step further. Facebook spent months classifying phrases commonly used in clickbait headlines. Mr. Mosseri offered examples like “The Dog Barked at the Deliveryman and His Reaction Was Priceless,” or “When She Looked Under Her Couch Cushions and Saw THIS … I Was SHOCKED!”
The company’s algorithms then took note of the websites from which the articles were coming, and could detect patterns of traffic coming from those sites over time. That process was then automated, and content identified as clickbait will now appear lower in the news feed than before. Mr. Mosseri likened the practice to a kind of email spam filtering process.
The Godfather of Clickbait
In a way, the sorts of headlines that Vinnie wrote anticipated the headlines we now see on the Internet. Vinnie’s efforts were often better—as were those of other talented headline writers at the Post. But, in combining succinctness, irony, and absurdism, the Post’s headlines fashioned a model that editors at popular Internet news sites, in their never-ending efforts to attract clicks, often seek to emulate.