Comment by belak
12 hours ago
I wonder if this is an effort to combat pages which post a short clickbait description and require you to click "read more" to see the full description, and often post the link in the comments. There are lots of sites (Polygon immediately comes to mind) which are notorious for doing this as a way to get fake engagement which boosts their posts which gets more clickbait engagement.
I know it's all speculation, and this does come across as more monetization creep, but I can't help to wonder if there's an underlying reason beyond "line go up".
I have a friend who is a best-selling author, and her threads account was being heavily throttled (hundreds of likes a few months ago, fewer than ten now) -- it was suggested that it's because she is posting links away from Meta properties, and the way around it was this "link in the comments" tactic.
So it's not necessarily clickbait -- seems to be also an evolved workaround to fight throttling. :-/
This is one thing that distinguishes Bluesky from other sites: they don't penalize you for linking outside the platform
Yet. They’ll have to claw back the PE cash at some point.
20 replies →
Yet.
Is it so wrong for those who create content to want people to visit their website to consume that content? The alternative being that Facebook and Google summarize everyone's content and keep all the engagement and profit for themselves.
> Facebook and Google summarize everyone's content and keep all the engagement and profit for themselves.
Yes!! You’re getting it! This is what they’re optimizing for. Have been for a decade plus.
On the other hand, if we assume that Facebook and Google need to make some money, and people aren't willing to pay to use them, and people don't want ads to overshadow the algorithm, and people don't want to pay with their data, and...
What's the actual solution? What would an ethically run Google look like? I'm not even going to ask for Facebook, because I'm not convinced it's possible.
Google and Facebook make plenty of money off just ads. But that's not enough anymore, the line has to keep going up, forever.
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I think some part of this is anti-bot. They don't have a good solution to this yet, I and someone else I know got a lifetime ban from Meta just from opening an account.
No actions / no posts. I guess they determined the way we opened the account was too bot like. Sucks because we're real people that were trying to buy Meta ads.
But maybe doing something like this allows them to ease those restrictions, and then by charging for posts they have an ability to determine bots from non-bots in a more robust way. I'm doubtful it will actually work - because bots are exactly the type of thing that can and will try to open dozens of accounts to get around the 2 posts per month limit.
People put the link in the comments because Facebook won't let you link to news sites in posts because they can't be posted in certain countries. So, putting the link in the comments was a workaround for that issue.
Yeah I mean it's a problem I'm in groups that just get tons of spam to things off-site that are mainly scams or just fake to get you to view a an ad-ridden page.
If it works for Polygon wouldn't they just pay the subscription?
In today's AI world, it should be trivial for platforms to identify posts using suck tricks. They can simply ask an LLM "Does the following post contain some scummy engagement trick: $POST".
Then downrank them.