Comment by slfnflctd
11 hours ago
Posts containing links to external sites which are not owned by the parent company are downranked or outright excluded in many social media feeds. This has been a known pattern for many years.
It's not only Facebook doing it, but they are probably the biggest offender.
You can't even put a link in a post to Instagram; student groups post links to events and say "click the link in our profile for more information" and the same is true for local news organizations.
And it's not like we are just spamming our own links, like I like to share links to news stories to my friends, family and followers.
Is this what's behind the "link to the article in comments" that all news outlets do on FB?
100%. Any link in the body of a post on any social media platform, if they even allow it, will cause it to be excluded from feeds. The post will only show when someone visits your profile directly.
They just realized 10 years ago that allowing people to click off-platform is terrible for engagement numbers, and they realized that they could just prevent it by silently suppressing such content.
this stuff might be cargo cult, but there's also an interaction/engagement signal because you have to expand the comments so the post itself might be higher ranked when they do this
No it's 100% placed in comments to try and circumvent Meta's down-ranking of posts with links. Posting in comments doesn't work any more however. Remembering the promise of the early internet, I really can't despise the gatekeepers any more than I do.