The American Scholar, the magazine of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. Future Tense. If you use Facebook, you’re probably familiar with the sort of post shown in the image above. It’s called “like-baiting,” and it has run amok on the social network in recent years. That’s because the software that determines what we see at the top of our Facebook news feed is tuned to show us posts that lots of other people have liked, shared, or commented on. Corporate brands, media outlets, and other "content producers" have learned this, and many now use like-baiting to game the system. People’s responses to like-baiting fall into three categories.
The first group resents the blatant manipulation and intentionally avoids clicking. It’s that third group that’s been ruining things for those of us in the first group. In a blog post on Thursday, Facebook announced that it’s tweaking the news feed to crack down on like-baiting, along with other forms of “spammy” content. You’d think those of us in the media would greet these changes with a sigh of relief.
Culture Making | Andy Crouch, Nate Barksdale and friends on faith and culture. Mother Jones | Smart, Fearless Journalism. Politics, opinion, world news, sports, latest, live, daily | The Punch. The Christian Science Monitor. The Humanist Archive | The Humanist. Prospect Magazine. International - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News.
The Globalist | Default and the Sectarian Temptation: America’s Achilles’ Heel by Ira Straus. Disinformation: Everything You Know Is Wrong. Spectator Magazine | World Politics & Current Events News and Discussion. The Awl - Be Less Stupid. N+1. Slate Magazine. Salon.com. World business, finance and political news from the Financial Times– FT.com Asia. Foreign Policy - the global magazine of economics, politics, and ideas.
More Intelligent Life. Wired.com. Boing Boing. Science news and science jobs from New Scientist. American Scientist Online.
Letters of Note. The Browser | Writing Worth Reading. Home. Thought Catalog. The Dabbler.