BF:
Since then, people who rely on Facebook for eyeballs (like journalists) have been nervously trying to figure out what this change means — is “meaningful engagement” just shorthand for comments? Well, they should just ask me, because I’ve figured it all out. And I’m using this to torture my friends.Related: "Google’s increased traffic to publishers is replacing the traffic publishers have lost from Facebook, according to new data from Chartbeat."
...
So here we are, at a new phase in Facebook’s history, when comments are king. But this has led to a new version of the overnight oats problem: People are being served the same stale content from a friend for 12 days straight, just because it happens to have a lot of comments. No one wanted to see my post several times a day, but the algorithm had, once again, misjudged what people wanted. In fact, people really hated this video — they wanted it to go away. Facebook took their pleas for it to stop as a sign that they should be shown it more and more.
...
You can try this yourself; it’s easy to game the system by posting something that drives comments.
