I long ago banned IFLS, BuzzFeed, UpWorthy and a lot more from my feed. I also banned anyone who was excessively linking to viral sites.

I've also removed certain SEOs who are at many search conferences around the country from my feed since virtually everything they post is useless. How can you take an SEO seriously who quibbles with you by linking to a dot info site as proof?

I have an auto-ignore to clickbait headlines and if I see the sensationalist and text headline of a clickbait article, I never, ever click it. Some publications are set up to only run those headlines, and usually, they are there to encourage ad clicks.

Facebook has now announced the changes.
Further reducing clickbait in feed [newsroom.fb.com]

>>IFLS, BuzzFeed, UpWorthy

Yup!

Honestly, if the Facebook algo works, it will be a service to humanity.

The original source is considerably more detailed.

First, we categorized tens of thousands of headlines as clickbait by considering two key points: (1) if the headline withholds information required to understand what the content of the article is; and (2) if the headline exaggerates the article to create misleading expectations for the reader. For example, the headline “You’ll Never Believe Who Tripped and Fell on the Red Carpet…” withholds information required to understand the article (What happened? Who Tripped?) The headline “Apples Are Actually Bad For You?!” misleads the reader (apples are only bad for you if you eat too many every day). A team at Facebook reviewed thousands of headlines using these criteria, validating each other’s work to identify a large set of clickbait headlines. -- [newsroom.fb.com...]

Our system identifies posts that are clickbait and which web domains and Pages these posts come from.

It will be interesting to see how Buzzfeed and Upworthy respond. I would not be sad to see them respond with Chapter 11 filings...

We anticipate that most Pages won’t see any significant changes

Ahh... and Facebook becomes Google.

I'm withholding my glee until I see how well the algo changes work... But if it suppresses even half it's a profound service to humanity :)

If we could also highlight the pages/people that link to sites that spread a three paragraph story out over 15 pages and then bury the "Next" button between semi naked women and a dizzying amount of ads that would be great!

All for improvement of the web. I've also been around long enough to know that each of these "proactive machine learning algos" has a tendency to collect immense collateral damage. Hope that is not the case this time.

No Machine will mimic a human.

There, Yes, Right there will be Clickers >>>

I've seen a list of the ten worst offenders.

you WON'T believe number 6!

you WON'T believe number 6!

You have been assimilated!

Ironic, that since this news was posted on the net, click-bait has increased exponentially on Facebook .. There's more there now than there ever was before --

Hmmm. True, that's what I've been experiencing as well. There are more click-baits than ever.