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.
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.
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.