[marbletiles]

> The core problem, IMO, is that content that makes us angry, anxious or jealous is a much better driver of clicks than content that makes us happy.

Right ... and if they're not careful here, they'll just go back to how FB was before the brands all moved in: people posting content that made each other angry or anxious.

A FB feed full of people trolling one other and squabbling about politics in long comment threads might look like it's "sparking conversations" and worth promoting in News Feed, but it's fundamentally going to be the same sort of turn-off as any badly-run forum is.

The core core problem is the content incentives: whether for brands or individuals, FB incentivises content that gets interactions, and without moderation of some kind that leads inexorably to trolling/clickbait.

[JasonFruit]

Wow, who are your friends? I regularly interact with people I'm not angry at, even on Facebook.

[marbletiles]

I have a perfectly lovely set of friends, who often post lovely things.

But when I think back to all the “long comments” and “spark conversation” type posts, they’re not lovely. They are politics or other things that spark FB’s equivalent of a flame war.

So my fear is that using those things to indicate these posts should be more prominent is going to be a tricky thing for them to get right.

Getting a computer to decide between “has lots of comments because it’s a fight” and “has lots of comments because it’s useful and interesting” is an interesting challenge.

[kartickv]

A "Was that worth it?" button might help distinguish clickbait or angerbait from genuinely worthwhile and fulfilling information. Say you participated in a conversation on FB. When the conversation ends, you might get a notification from FB the next time to log in asking you whether it was good.

Or a news site could have a Was it worth it? button at the end of each story, to help identify clickbait or otherwise low-quality articles. Rather than measuring how many page views each journalist drives, they might measure how many satisfied readers that article had, and reward journalists who write high-quality articles.

[JasonFruit]

That is a good statement of the problem. It seems like I've read about some pretty effective tone analysis for English, at least, that might be helpful.

[netsharc]

Well, studies have said social media increases anxiety, I suppose because people usually post highlights of their lives, on average people's reaction to those posts is jealousy and feeling like "Why is my life shit?"...