There is a decent chance that this change will in large part determine what you read on the Internet in 2014. Maybe not “you,” the regular Salon reader or relative of the author, but “you” the person who clicked on this story because someone you know shared it on Facebook or Twitter. The purpose of the Facebook change was to encourage the sharing of more “high-quality” news content — that is, to make sure you are more likely to see it when “high-quality” news content is shared, because Facebook’s news feed algorithms do as much hiding as highlighting — and the result seems to have been an immediate decline in the traffic of all the sites that spent 2013 mastering the art of blowing up on Facebook. (Well, all of them but one, but we’ll get to that.)
