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Comment by eknkc | Hacker News Reader

So, nothing to back that claim. No data or announcement from Facebook. Just a remark about external web links being shit on mobile and that's it. Not even a decent argument there. It's like saying elephants will grow tall necks in 2005 because of some random reason.

Am I missing something here?

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> Am I missing something here?

Yes. Facebook announced updates to their Newsfeed algorithm to reduce the amount of "promotional" content people see in their feeds.

https://www.facebook.com/business/news/update-to-facebook-ne...

But the article is talking about Facebook limiting non-promotional Web links. It might be a reasonable thing for Facebook to do, but it's not obvious that they will.

The author is a finance blogger at Reuters (http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/) and they asked for a 2015 prediction. You're right, I don't see anything to back up the prediction.

Maybe the author is hoping this article will go viral on Facebook? It certainly has a bit of a link-baity headline.

Felix Salmon is no longer at Reuters. The article itself and the link both show as much.

that was my thinking... if he calls it right, he can point back to this article. If he called it wrong, no one will probably remember this post.

Interestingly, it's part of a broader query posed to many journalist and neatly compiled here: http://www.niemanlab.org/collection/predictions-2015/

EVEN better, they follow a sane URL-naming scheme so last year's predictions were easy enough to find: http://www.niemanlab.org/collection/predictions-2014/

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