If you get tired of seeing endless posts of like this to say this, or heart this to say that on Facebook, you're in luck, as the social network has announced that it's now looking to cut back on the amount of baiting posts that appear on its site and subsequently on your news feed.
The three main categories it's targeting with this crackdown, as per ArsTechnica, are vote baiting, react baiting and share baiting. They encourage people to engage with them based on the potential to win a competition, to share their feelings or to show support for something. Effectively, any e-begging performed by pages and groups in order to encourage engagement and thereby spread the post further and increase the amount of interest and eyeballs on any particular page.
That's going to be far less common in the future, according to Facebook. On top of making them less common in your feed, it hopes that companies and page owners will stop using the practice as it becomes less effective. However, if they don't, Facebook will begin to implement impactful restrictions on how often those pages can post and what kind of reach they see. Companies that rely on their Facebook pages getting a lot of interest and engagement will want to taper off pretty swiftly, as those rules could see a huge downturn in traffic to them and their subsequent exterior websites.
This doesn't necessarily mean that all posts that encourage engagement with followers and page-likers will be demoted, but it will specifically target the most spammy, content-free attempts at engagement manipulation.
Do you see this as a welcome change to Facebook?
