Deep diving the murk of the social media content factories

Awful or generic content leads to awful or generic experiences. Should publishers even swim these waters?

by Rob Corbidge

Published:

Taking a dive, or more often, a deep dive, is a common thing in the tech industry. Many of us will have been at presentations, conferences, talks or whatever and been privy to such deep dives.

In the simplest expression, they are a way of people who have built a thing explaining how that thing works to people who often don't know how such things work.

As any of you who have been actual real underwater diving will know, the deeper you get, the less you can see, unless aided by increasingly powerful artificial illumination. Genuine deep diving is a murky, dangerous business.

With this in mind, bear with us while we take a look at the current state of published Facebook content. 

Despite being regarded as your grandma's platform, Facebook still has, annoyingly, a few real strengths - not the least of which are local groups. These geographically delineated groups, based around a particular locale, act both as a form of bush telegraph and also where local businesses, events and activities can be brought to local attention.

Being a member of several such groups I can confirm they are often highly active, which is the only real measure of use. The groups themselves are largely a good thing, however the fact they nestle most comfortably on a Meta-owned platform is a source of regret. Could it be any other way? Is there a meta without Meta? 

The perils of the deep

It's in the proliferation of "interest pages" on the supposedly agnostic Facebook where the real content horror shows dwell; it's not easy to make Outbrain look like Dickens, but many of them manage it. For clarity, we're talking about the kind of page where the associated website serves overlay adverts or attempts to open new browser pages when all you're doing is looking at the About Us page. This is the wrong side of the algorithm tracks.

Facebook's algo has me multi-pigeonholed as interested in archaeology, history, aircraft, outdoor activities, and a few other things. Consequently my profile is served a fairly heavy diet of such pages, and I'd say the ratio of bad to good is around is 4 to 1. 

By "bad" I mean that the content is obviously cribbed from other sites, or is AI trash, and is probably unedited. The written content on such pages often gets caught on some minor fact, and then repeats that fact a number of times because that's what machines or SEO spam can end up doing. 

It's a profoundly unsatisfying diet. 

Images are likewise cribbed, often with captions so generic as to reveal the paucity of understanding by those humans or machines involved in producing them. 

In trying to understand the structures that produce such content, at most all you get are glimpses. Going to the associated website will usually bring up some minimal effort tiled WordPress theme, and tatty sites where things like author pages brings up bio pictures which are copied, fake, or AI. Said authors are untraceable, but often curiously close to the names of real writers.

Yet someone is making some kind of money off the back of such content. 

There's no snobbery here. Trash content can be great and engaging to lots of people: we are currently in an epic maelstrom of memes, and you'd have to be very obstinate not to admit there's some fabulous stuff. 

But for content to be good there must surely be some love in it, trash or not, and such FB content seems utterly devoid of that vital factor.

It also means that pearls must sit amongst muck. The Tower of London in the UK has an excellent Facebook presence, which due to my history interests has been recommended to me by Big Algo. Yet it sits among a page offering me "Ancient Dorset, the land of Holloway’s, old tracks and sunken roads". That would be holloways, my dear attention farmers. 

Alongside all such pages as this, there's also a lot of straight up honest people putting out content for things they care deeply about, or understand well, on pages that are excellent and informative.

As always with platforms, it's the humans which make it good or bad.

What does this mean for publishers, sitting out in the rain in the Meta doghouse? 

Allow me some Christmas flippancy, but... who cares? If the only visibility we can get on Facebook is sandwiched between lowest common denominator content factories, then that isn't a position we should be craving anyway.

There may well be gold at the bottom of the deep dive, but the readers we all speak to are ill-served if they have to sift through mud to get it when we can place it more prominently on our own sites  or channels which place value on the reader experience.