I wonder if this is an effort to combat pages which post a short clickbait description and require you to click "read more" to see the full description, and often post the link in the comments. There are lots of sites (Polygon immediately comes to mind) which are notorious for doing this as a way to get fake engagement which boosts their posts which gets more clickbait engagement.
I know it's all speculation, and this does come across as more monetization creep, but I can't help to wonder if there's an underlying reason beyond "line go up".
I have a friend who is a best-selling author, and her threads account was being heavily throttled (hundreds of likes a few months ago, fewer than ten now) -- it was suggested that it's because she is posting links away from Meta properties, and the way around it was this "link in the comments" tactic.
So it's not necessarily clickbait -- seems to be also an evolved workaround to fight throttling. :-/
The entire point of atproto (which Bluesky is a demo for) is that when they betray us, we can keep our identity and followers and move on. Power in user hands not only makes the worst-case better, but it also changes the calculus for a service that's considering making anti-user moves and makes them far less appealing.
Bluesky the company/app certainly isn't perfect, but the model they pioneer is very much designed to help fix this exact problem.
Is it so wrong for those who create content to want people to visit their website to consume that content? The alternative being that Facebook and Google summarize everyone's content and keep all the engagement and profit for themselves.
Yeah I mean it's a problem I'm in groups that just get tons of spam to things off-site that are mainly scams or just fake to get you to view a an ad-ridden page.
In today's AI world, it should be trivial for platforms to identify posts using suck tricks. They can simply ask an LLM "Does the following post contain some scummy engagement trick: $POST".
As someone who helps small businesses create their own websites... thank you Facebook! Seriously though, back when "Facebook Pages instead of websites" were all the rage, FB demoting page content in feeds officially killed that movement and I was similarly happy.
It is crazy to me that a lot of towns have literally switched to engaging people on FB. Not only are they at mercy of FB, but there are a lot of insane people on FB. Often people who are not even members of the community comment and see those posts. Towns can't delete comments.
I cannot wait until this whole FB trends ends. I want RSS feeds or blogs. Businesses should have their own basic websites that serve their needs.
I'm no fan of FB, but the problem is deeper than FB. If FB vanishes overnight, some other service will take its place, and the same people who posted on FB will post on whatever the new website/service is.
Yes, it would be nice if FB fades into obscurity. But what would be nicer is if people had some basic decency and responsibility (everyone, me included) before posting clickbaity, flammable, junk stuff. I have no clue how to achieve this, but the internet used to be a fun place (for learning, niche topics/ideas etc) - those days are gone, and it sucks
Those comments you mentioned are a bit of a problem. Whenever admin complains about them I always say, "You're using Facebook. What do you expect? Only retired people, idiots, and bots are on there."
They never seem to understand what I'm talking about because, unfortunately, most of the folks in wildfire admin are 50+ years old
> Not only are they at mercy of FB, but there are a lot of insane people on FB.
A fair number - not all - I am convinced are foreign trolls, or bots. There's something which just feels a bit different from a normal partisan, and the kinds of folks who invade every regional (town, county, etc.) group and post nonstop partisan dreck. Their profiles are off in some way, and the hours they are posting are all over the map.
FB does have the "big tent" thing going on, where they wanted to become the tool for every possible organizing principle. So you do get some of the legitimately most wacky people on the internet as well.
AT Proto has a chance to really help here, so that governments and other orgs and publish structured content like posts and events, and have them indexed and distributed through all kinds of AT Proto services and apps, including, but not limited to Bluesky.
I hope to see turnkey organization oriented PDSes that let an admin management multiple accounts, and also host web pages with the same content that's distributed on network. Then gov posts has a web home and can be subscribed to in AT Proto apps.
I would say that the missing link in the discussion is that the valuable data they are mining is social networks and the fidelity of their data there is of a much higher fidelity than what FB or IG provides since these are in-person events, typically.
Also all those data promises go out the window as soon as they are acquired. Then it's Privacy Policy updates with retroactive addendums. Would be very surprised if that wasn't the ultimate goal.
It is an interesting move, because deploying a viable website has never been easier. FB had an advantage on default reach, but even that is slowly becoming a question as younger generations use it less.
If a business relies solely on FB it doesn’t exist for me. If they maintain multiple places online it’ll be interesting how this payment will play out…
I think the article says you can't post links from your FB page to external sites. What you're describing is the opposite: links from outside FB to an FB page. Of course they don't mind when you bring traffic to FB.
I quit Facebook in 2012. I cannot imagine what's there but in 2019 I had to create a new account to test some development stuff, and checked friends and family and it was pretty much dead.
Facebook is dead among young people, but there are still some dedicated users.
The thing about Facebook is that it's a far more functional social network than the popular alternatives. It's pretty much the go-to for running local community groups.
Stepping into my wife’s shoes, it’s absolutely not a ghost town. It’s where she communicates with community members and other parents of kids at our local school. It’s how she talks about utility issues, road closures, and other local events. It's where we learned that our city was finally getting a Taco Bell!
Meanwhile I haven't used it in 15+ years and don't ever feel the need for it. Probably in part because my better two-thirds has that side of things covered.
I think "Facebook is dead" is a trap for people who can only reason about the world through their own perspective.
You’re not wrong but also I see why people say it’s dead. What it was for, for me, in 2008, was seeing the life updates of humans I care about and to share my own. Pictures, genuine opinions and rants, new relationships, travelogues. They long ago modified the platform to make it nearly impossible to use it for that purpose, by refusing to surface any of that content, preferring to show you ragebait and “viral” content from strangers instead.
When normal people noticed the tremendous drop in engagement from friends on their personal content, most of them stopped posting. So today, even if you find the hidden option (Feeds->Friends) that gives that feature, there’s nearly nothing of value left. For me, I have two friends still regularly posting, but 2/3 of their “posts” are just political links or reshares.
It is true that it is useful for things. I have groups about niche interests or local stuff that still function, but Meta could decide at any time to remove most group posts from the feed the same way they did with “friend posts” and links. If they do that, it will probably severely damage the usefulness of Facebook to people who use it for that kind of purpose, the same way as it did for people who used it to keep in touch with friends.
The only type of user that doesn’t need to worry is the one who wants to use Facebook as a lens to see popular viral content from strangers.
I know a few whose digital social lives revolve around Facebook as well.
It's hard to imagine because when you're out, and peek back in, your account no longer contains strong interest signals, and so your feed contains absolute junk (scams, engagement bait, etc.)
Whereas a heavy user would see tailored and targeted (and one can argue, useful) posts.
Yeah, facebook it's not dead, it's just that, at least in My circle or city, the publications are never personal: it's for bussines (to find a new apartment o look to the marketplace for something You need) but no more personal posts. also the groups started to get beggars and requests for money and donations, and nobody trusts the groups or the profiles for an in person meeting. Maybe this is because i'm in a third world country ajajaja
I reconnected with family I was out of touch with quickly after rejoining Facebook and went to see them in IRL.
I am in a few photography groups and see some photos people want comments on all the time and I'm always saying "It's not the length of the lens but how you use it" and stuff like that.
I find out about community events like local bands and broom dancing all the time on Facebook... Students do tell me though that they think it is dead.
In the 2010s, there was a move away from files in the name of convenience (lock-in).
The 2020s are a war on hyperlinks. It is particularly unfortunate to see this masquerading as a concern for safety and security (“everything outside of our platform is scary and insecure”)
I get that Facebook is trying to make some $$$ on them here, but I wasn't aware we had any war (not even a "war on Christmas" fake war) going on against links.
Posts containing links to external sites which are not owned by the parent company are downranked or outright excluded in many social media feeds. This has been a known pattern for many years.
It's not only Facebook doing it, but they are probably the biggest offender.
You can't even put a link in a post to Instagram; student groups post links to events and say "click the link in our profile for more information" and the same is true for local news organizations.
And it's not like we are just spamming our own links, like I like to share links to news stories to my friends, family and followers.
100%. Any link in the body of a post on any social media platform, if they even allow it, will cause it to be excluded from feeds. The post will only show when someone visits your profile directly.
They just realized 10 years ago that allowing people to click off-platform is terrible for engagement numbers, and they realized that they could just prevent it by silently suppressing such content.
this stuff might be cargo cult, but there's also an interaction/engagement signal because you have to expand the comments so the post itself might be higher ranked when they do this
No it's 100% placed in comments to try and circumvent Meta's down-ranking of posts with links. Posting in comments doesn't work any more however. Remembering the promise of the early internet, I really can't despise the gatekeepers any more than I do.
Try clinking hyperlinks on any modern platform that A) don't try to open in-platform, and/or B) don't try to generate an AI summary of its content as the default rather than open it (looking at you Hubspot), and/or C) don't hit you with a modal that requires you to check a box in addition to clicking through.
It's always like this. Just keep adding layers of friction until people don't bother. Engagement is still the obsession.
It's a shame that Musk's politics are a distraction from the ways that Twitter has become hostile and worse for non-political reasons. That was the first place I became aware of hyperlinks causing posts to get hidden or downranked.
The book "Hatching Twitter" is a pretty eye-opening history of Twitter from the very beginning. If true, Twitter pre-Elon was run by people with strange product opinions, in a fairly dysfunctional, ineffective way. Jack Dorsey, who comes across as a grade-A weirdo in the book, was first pushed out and later reinstalled in a palace coup.
I seriously can’t understand why there’s so much respect for anyone that works at Meta.
These people have arguably contributed nothing to society for over a decade (and maybe even made it worse in some instances) for very fat salaries, and yet they’re being praised for being the example of best engineers.
I periodically use their websites and they’re horrible!
Seriously, we should know better as the dev-tech society.
And I don’t give a darn about their research that is being built on top of barely legal mass surveillance so don’t tell me their contributions from stealing data were helpful.
It's like the best of the best mechanical and electrical engineers have teamed up to build the world's most efficient orphan crushing machine. It sips power, runs cool, requires almost no maintenance, and pulverizes orphans into dense little cubes for easy clean up.
Also it has a glorious viewing gallery to watch and listen to a thousand doomed orphans get fed to Zuckerberg’s ego so it can illuminate the path to total enshittification.
The orphan crushing machine is a meme (https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/orphan-crushing-machine). Most of Meta's products hurt society from driving impressionable young girls into an early grave, over supporting genocide and ethnic cleansing, to splitting voters into rabid fans with blind devotion on "their team" over everything else.
They also work hard to force users into their walled gardens and to stop the useful content users to this day feed into they intentionally broken services from escaping into the real world wide web of hyperlinked and discoverable content.
In short they're at the forefront of making the internet harmful to society and less useful to almost everyone.
Similar to how Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, etc. used tiny fractions of their wealth, on things that would bolster the opinions of the public. They’re laudable, but become less so when you see the bigger picture. Those free software tools are things that Meta needs for its own operations, and their moat is so vast that they can give them away for free and benefit from public participation.
> their mission of destroying the fabric of society and the mental well-being of teenagers
Their mission is to make Zuckerberg rich and powerful. That’s the sole purpose of Meta, everything else is incidental. It just so happens that they also destroy the fabric of society and the mental well-being of teenagers but it’s not their primary goal, they just don’t care about the side effect. It would be all the same if they were poisoning coral reefs and giving wedgies to grandmothers instead. As long as the process benefits Zuckerberg in the end, nothing else matters to the company.
It's the era of mad boy kings. 'Boy' being more of an attitude than a strict age requirement.
We used to have something resembling a democracy, now we have an evolving neo-fascist hellscape created by a cabal of the least interesting tech people on the planet.
It opened the floodgates, though. It was a real paradigm shift. After LLaMa, everybody saw that you could release large open models without any negative repercussions, and DeepSeek et al. hopped aboard the wagon. LLaMa was the first popular model that was truly open to the global public.
Meta earned a ton of goodwill by doing this -- it was very brave, and very influential. In my eyes, it outweighs everything negative they've ever done.
Let's stop saying that open weight models are open source. They are just a software that you can run on your own hardware (if you have a ton of money to spend to get it anyway) but they are not open, they are as open as any proprietary software that you can run on your PC is.
You can't study them, you can't modify them, you can't improve them, you can't look into how they are built etc.
> These people have arguably contributed nothing to society for over a decade
React, React Native, GraphQL, LLama, PyTorch, RocksDB, Cassandra, folly, Hack, HHVM, OCP, Presto, btrfs, cgroupsv2/PSI, eBPF, zstd, roughly 12% of all Linux kernel contributions are signed off by Meta + Meta is the 5th biggest contributor to Linux kernel.
Also a ton of other projects that did not originally come out of Meta but get a ton of patches and support/funding: MySQL, Memcached, Hadoop, LLVM, Systemd, Rust, Python etc.
Perhaps research a bit more before you make these ignorant comments.
I can take a brief look at the social damage meta has done and say that, to me, none of those contributions are worth the pain that they have caused.
From the messed up self-image issues they instill on children to the hand they played - either intentionally or through pure ignorance - in ethnic cleansing, I couldn't care less about what they've done in the tech space when those commits are signed in blood.
That's fine, but the original question asked why people respect devs who work at Meta given they haven't contributed anything. (It didn't explicitly say devs, but when meta employees are getting respect around here, that's who's being discussed.) Your parent reply demonstrated that they have in fact contributed a lot, so there are obviously some accomplished developers working there.
It's certainly possible to see the company as a net negative for society while also recognizing those contributions. One could even argue that that could simultaneously be the case, while the net effects of some particular devs working there are positive (though I could imagine reasonable arguments on both sides of that one).
A lot of people have died horribly, millions, perhaps billions of lives have been affected negatively, democracies have been subverted, but at least we got a nice compression algorithm?
And React, although the jury remains out on whether that's a transformative technology or... not.
You don't need to be so melodramatic. It is horrible, sad and all that jazz, but , how should I say it in a way that may appear more relatable to your empathetic mind:
if you don't use zstd, all those deaths will be for nothing.
And now for the important question:
How does that make you feel? Because it is not about horrible deaths, is it? It is about you.
"Zstd is worth a lot of other's people's pain." in response to a post about how Facebook helped enable ethnic cleansing makes you look sociopathic. You just said "this tech is worth the deaths of thousands!!!!"
I have no respect for React, React Native and GraphQL. They are all horrible and don't solve actual problems. They aren't even the best tools to accomplish what they're trying to accomplish.
I don't know anything about the other things so I can't say if they are good or not. But acting as if react is some big invention is crazy. bell Labs gave us Unix and C. Meta isn't even close to inventing something like that.
You can have a lot of beef with react, but this is the lamest one. Of course it solves many problems, that's why it landed at the top. It took the C out of MVC, it made view rendering deterministic and simplified event management. It also stayed somewhat stable on the API side over the years.
It's neat that I can now put an OCP NIC in a bog-standard server from the major players but I'm not sure that makes up for how everything else OCP becomes e-waste much faster than regular EIA-310 gear.
I will invert these: These are IMO not great software, but software that have name recognition because they were built and marketed by a giant company.
Yawn, I've used none of these except Linux and I would expect that their Linux contributions have been self-serving and not made it better for regular users like me.
zstd is pretty good, but not so much better than the alternatives to justify any of Meta's harms. I like btrfs because it makes my backups simpler and faster, but I don't need it, and I'd happily go back to ext4 to be rid of Meta.
For a fairly sizable portion of the population (especially the tech worker population), salary/TC is seen as the measure of someone's value as a human being. I've had acquaintances who really, sincerely struggled to understand the concept than an engineer making 1/N what an engineer at Meta/Google/etc does could be overall a better engineer. The typical reply has been something along the lines of "but if they're better, why don't they just make more money?"
They really couldn't understand when I tried to explain that, in my experience, nearly all the really brilliant and interesting technical people I knew tended to be making less, because they would rather work on interesting problems with a high degree of control than play leveling games at a large corporation.
There is a difference between contributing nothing to society and doing more harm than good overall.
The former is just wrong in the case of Meta, you don't need to look far to find many of their contributions. The latter is debatable, but it is not what you said.
There is also a difference between the company as a whole and the people working for it. Their "very fat salaries" can let them support noble causes, or not, they are people, in all their complexity, not just machine parts.
Man, if my old DoD contractor job paid $150K, I’d probably still be working there. A lot of DoD contracting firms pay much less than that. Especially in the R&D space where a lot of smart people want to work.
In a weird way, I'm kind of glad that they're ruining facebook.com.
Like, even in its heyday, it was such an attention trap, and it had very negative effects on the people who got addicted (especially teens).
But the site has gotten so much worse in the past couple years, and its brand is in the garbage. Maybe that's all for the best -- it was never really worth preserving.
The issue is that small business still utilize them instead of paying for and maintaining a web site. Want to know our business ours, events, or when we close early ... facebook.
There needs to be an easy to use low-cost, possible also advertisement driven, alternative that business can latch to so more can leave facebook.
I actively refuse to support Meta and block all their domain names in case of clicking on a tiny URL that sends me to their site. It also helps block their analytics used by 3rd parties. I will forever be a sunk cost for them.
I don’t really agree. All that’s happened is the shift of people onto newer platforms which didn’t need to evolve into disgusting highly-optimized addiction traps because they were specifically designed to be that from the start. Like TikTok or its identical copycats.
> I seriously can’t understand why there’s so much respect for anyone that works at Meta.
Only because the longer you work there, probably the more you've been able to handle while you time there, but I don't really care if you worked at Meta or at Momandpop Software Corp down the road, I care about your personality and ability to learn and adapt, these are stronger signals of the types of devs I want to work with than anything else. I'd still consider you, but I might pass on you if I feel more confident about someone else.
People working at Meta tend to gravitate around the same group of tech companies who offer the same range of salaries, same selection process, same internal structure. Many of them aren't particularly brillant SWEs (in the sense you don't need to be an elite coder or top PhD), although they can deliver based on the evaluation processes in these companies.
Meta has a bad reputation in some circles, but I don't think there's anything peculiar or particularly evil about them, at least not worse than similar publicly traded big tech companies. They are amoral money-making entities.
That being said I agree that their products suck. I don't use them, besides what's app because it's difficult to avoid. It's also end to end encrypted so it doesn't really matter regarding mass surveillance.
> These people have arguably contributed nothing to society for over a decade […] they’re being praised for being the example of best engineers.
React? We can all criticize it, but it has revolutionized the web. Llama. Did you forget what sparked the whole open-weight wave? It was that. I dislike Meta, but I would not criticize the engineers competence. They have done impressive things, check out their blog if you genuinely are curious.
React ruined the web, and the mobile development too.
Now to load a simple website that in the past was a few kB of HTML, CSS and JS you need to download Mb of JS code. Now the browser needs to use Mb of RAM just to display a stupid webpage.
For what? It was better when we had PHP pages that did produce HTML on the server side.
Another thing to me that we have to get Meta discredit for, not something good in any way.
The web was broken long before React came along. Or have you forgotten about Angular, incompatibilities between JS engines that required hacks like jQuery, the Internet Explorer monopoly, and those who gave up on the stagnating specifications from w3c entirely so wrote their sites in Flash? Or worse, JavaApplets. Or even worse yet, ActiveX (it took a decade for South Korea to undo that latter mistake)
what is react responsible for? If you're referring to the explosion of SPAs, I think you should direct your blame to angularjs... React was just a better version of that revolution.
Agreed. React, imo, was a much better Backbone.js. Relatively lightweight primitives, composition, and JSX made building frontend applications fun without having to wire up everything by hand.
Alan Kay also said this about his famous "Point of View is worth 80 IQ points" aphorism, which I think poignantly explains why React costs a net of 160 IQ points compared to Svelte:
>I have been keeping to "80" IQ points in the saying (thus avoiding inflation). However very few people have noticed there is no sign bit in the aphorism, and that it works just as well for "poor perspectives being worth negative 80 IQ points" (and I think we could claim inflation of stupidity in many bad directions these days ...).
> These people have arguably contributed nothing to society for over a decade
Not as FB. But they have shipped a lot of useful stuff. That doesn't mean the company is suddenly great and all should be forgiven but there is some nuance here.
In addition to all of their open source contributions, their ability to pay a ton of money and fun problems to solve led a lot of fantastic engineers to want to work there — especially before 2015.
Okay so one of the reasons I post on Meta platforms less nowadays is that they often don't show my content to my own followers and friends. I'm tired of talking to walls. I'm tired of having communication between friends gatekept by a stupid algorithm. I'm fine with recommendation systems being used for things I DON'T subscribe to, but if it's between friends I want to see ALL of it.
So now it's "pay $50 to post 2 links" but does that guarantee them showing it to your followers and friends? If NOT -- is that sufficient reason for a fraud lawsuit?
And yet Google isn't quite as rebuked. There's another thread on HN today about ads in google TV.
But from a technical perspective, Google breaks constantly. Here's one. On Pixel you could use Assistant to start a timer or open an application. For years. Then Gemini is forced (first opt in, then forced, as is the Google Way)- there's no way to turn off voice out loud response, and opening apps - the most basic thing - doesn't work.
Then you have long-standing headaches like Gmail interface, reports of people's businesses getting blocked on Google Workspace, etc.
Facebook is blamed for that data broker scandal and making us hate our families due to political arguments. Google does all the same data broker stuff, and other than not being a forever scroll social media site, it's morally and technically repugnant.
The companies thought of having good engineers don't actually have good engineers. When there's a "prestige" with working somewhere it attracts the worst personalities in the field.
It ain't the same as the Bell Labs days. They try to larp as if they are the computer scientists of old but none of them are. They are just there for the salary and prestige and that's it.
Because they do Leetcode interview and the day to day work is to solve Leetcode problems.
Now tell me where else can I find such a company having that?
I only care about competitive programming and solve algorithm problem. Nothing else matter: I don't care about product, frontend, security, data pipeline, bla bla nonsense.
And by the way, $400k+ salary in cash and RSU please. No stock options, thank you.
Competitive programming is the funniest thing I've ever heard. Leetcode in an interview and I end the interview immediately because I know everyone I work with is probably a corporate bootlicker. Because who else would study something as useless as leetcode. People who grow up learning by rote love leetcode though because they just memorize the answers.
To me, product management and product engineering are the corporate bootlicker. You spend all day long adjusting the pixels, taking tickets from customers who ask for things like "why is button red not green", "why this list is not sorted alphabetically", or "I want this field 30px higher, not lower".
And by the way, you fought through all of that for a $15k-20k ARR contract. Never again, thank you.
Oh, and the PMs are just drones sitting in a room doing nothing but talks and herding the engineers like chicken, and try to claim credits for all the work engineers do. Never met a competent PM in my life.
> and yet they’re being praised for being the example of best engineers.
By whom? I haven't seen anyone say something positive about Meta or their employees for at least 15 years, unless you count people who were being paid to write PR articles.
There is nothing special about the engineering behind React. Success simply compounds, if big company X does something everyone else must do it, which leads to more contributors, which leads to more visibility.
Even being the creators of React still wasn't enough to fix their shitshow of a website with a bazillion anti-patterns and the worse, most annoying UX of all time.
Society basically says money = good. God forbid we treat a sex worker with respect but if you're precious little Johnny works at Facebook finding new and exciting ways to get teenagers even more addicted to their phones it's all good because he makes a lot of money and money = good.
There are tons of sex workers that rake in money that even FAANG engineers will never see in 10 lives (e.g OF 'models'). I doubt much of society has any respect for them though.
I have more respect for only fans models then fellow software developers nowadays. At least only fans models produce something others find valuable. We don't provide anything valuable anymore.
Facebook is one of the most successful products of all time. Billions of people use it because they get value out of it. You can raise all of the legitimate criticisms of Facebook that you want, and there are many, but saying they have contributed nothing to society is delusional.
Yes, people would seek out those services elsewhere because clearly there's a demand for them. I find this attitude very paternalistic. Why do you care how other people choose to spend their time? Is it the technology you don't like, or the people who use it?
Remember how Sears was a thing but they kept making dumb decisions and were also unable to adapt to new realities? Facebook/Meta is like that. Doomed company walking.
Sometimes I have thoughts like this, but then I get on the subway and watch everyone around me endlessly scroll Instagram while their brains melt out their ears, and then I decide that I was the one who was out of touch.
Yeah, Sears is wierd, they were well positioned to be where Amazon is today. But what feels like a small change 30 years later, Transition from mail order to web order, was too much for them?
I’d agree except most over the age of 45-50 will never leave FB for other platforms. They’ve got decades of milking money out of that cow before it dies completely
LinkedIn has seriously deranked posts with links in the past. Everything within Meta is heavily A/B tested, but it seems feasible that this will become real.
Instagram already does charge for outgoing links, so I would assume that they found that they can sustainably make money with it there, and that it should work on FB too.
The chosen thresholds are a bit absurd — e.g. if it was five rather than two I think authentic users would barely notice — but this actually might be what is needed to make Facebook useful again for people.
The amount of fake link spam, "link in comments" spam, misleading shit, is endless.
No amount of anti-spam technology is going to help. Cold hard cash requirement might do something about it.
If you assume that the only reason to run a fake celebrity page, for example, is to mislead users into some action, this might help there. Though actually what is needed there is a similar price pattern on posting email addresses.
Yeah — this is largely the dominant evolution of 419 fraud isn't it? Rarely very bespoke scams.
I think you could more or less instaban users who mention Telegram and nothing of value would be lost.
I see comment likes and replies from users called "Congratulations you've won…" or "Message me to win your prize" and if you report those, they are actually pretty much always removed (easy pattern I guess).
But nobody seems to have any luck with reporting fake celebrity scams, to the point that if you are a well-known user who has more comments than you can reply to, you more or less have to regularly post a video saying "I will never message you directly".
The threshold isn't for your grandpa, it's for Facebook Pages, which are basically landing pages for businesses on Facebook. And I think it's chosen very deliberately: so that you can set up your page for free, promote it, and then realize you need to pay to keep it alive.
> The threshold isn't for your grandpa, it's for Facebook Pages
Yes, I understood this, thanks.
It doesn't at all change my point: one of Facebook's biggest problems is deceptive pages that clone user content for clout, mislead users and then ultimately direct them for scams.
If you set a limit of five posts a month without paying, you would perhaps only punish fake pages, which are a high volume game.
It's an echo chamber, breaking it, allowing sound from the outside to come in has to be expensive because it breaks the main thing it stands for....
Remember from their own mouths the social aspect of the thing is dead... is only the manipulation, and now you can "tune" the interactions with LLMs so you hear exactly what someone pays for you to hear...
My facebook account was taken over by someone, but the safeguards locked it down. I can't access it. Neither, hopefully, can the bad actor.
I don't miss it, though I feel uncomfortable about the situation. Recovery has not been worth the time involved.
What sucks is that now I can't see a whole ton of local content: local event organizers, small businesses, municipal offices and agencies, community groups, etc. have all consolidated on "facebook" as where every announcement goes.
I hope they continue to make it a more obviously hostile walled garden and that organizations of all kinds move away. The network effect it has may be hard to overcome, however.
You can't see it because Zuckerberg in his fucking benevolence has decreed you need an account for PUBLIC LINKS AND POSTS
Never mind the fact his platform has routinely chipped away at privacy in the past, posts suspiciously going from Friends to Friends of Friends or Public. Like you can set it and it will straight up come unset
But it's totally cool to just lock things down for accounts only if you're Facebook, and never mind people get banned all the time for bullshit, horrible things that people report are never taken down, and it's apparently increasingly impossible to even make a new account
Well, there should be someway to fund all the ai efforts. On the other hand, I am hoping this reduces the extremely polarizing posts that seem to fill fb these days.
Isn't it funny that every change to "protect users" ends up with you paying Facebook more to reach the people that followed your page?
I still remember when Facebook Pages were promoted as an alternative to feeds and newsletters. You could follow a page and be sure to receive all updates from them. Now you even have to pay to share links.
It's a tactic, the only the latest of many, to go after people who use Facebook to communicate without paying for ads (that is to say - without paying current auction prices for the attention of the recipients of their messages.)
The few groups I'm in, local wildlife and pet bird groups, mainly consist of people asking questions that need to and are usually answered by posting links to local resources or regulations.
That group will have it's own llama agent to read all those links and tell the members the exact answers to their question so they don't have to leave the safe zone of facebook and go off into the scary internet.
Yep, it will basically mean the death of Facebook. I don’t use it much, but the groups I’m in are for sharing local events (usually link to library page, map for meetup location, etc). Without links, those groups go away.
Fun historical note: one of the first applications of the internet was the "world wide web" (WWW). The idea was people that people would host HTML files on the internet that would be connect to each other using "links" to form a web of "sites" (called, of course, "websites"). You can still find these websites on the internet if you leave the walled gardens and paywalls, but it takes some effort.
I didn't know this and kept sharing links on my new page and it was banned from posting.I tried to look for support but just received responses from bots all the time and no human review until I gave up. I ended up starting another page.
Surveillance capitalists have built a truly miserable internet.
I've been researching local newspapers, and the problems they face, lately, and one of them is that none of the social media sites allow them to get any visits from their followers because they either significantly de-rank posts with links off-site or it costs money to reach followers with links, or both. Of course Google scraping their sites and summarizing is another symptom of the same problem; FAANG wants all the revenue and a monopoly on what you see. Every penny every eyeball. None for small businesses, none for independent media, none for individuals.
The local newspapers are already cooked. Because of what you say, and because Alden Global already owns most of them and has fired 90% of the staff. My hometown paper features about one local story per week now, plus two copy pasted booking reports (I can tell because there’s some kind of encoding error that always eats hyphens, so people’s hyphenated names are always CamelCased instead. They sold their building 10 years ago and now operate out of a small office with about two desks.
Is this not a good idea? It makes average users more selective about what content they are sharing, and reduces scam/bot content that can currently spam post links for free.
Facebook knows what you want to see, because you can follow pages and individuals. They choose to show those scam/bot posts to you anyway. This isn't to fight bots.
Very few spam/scam posts I see rely on external links. FB is an all in one scammers paradise. This just seems like a transparent attempt to keep people on platform.
Those 35 links to "you wouldn't believe which politician wants to kill our kids now" type posts are why I quit facebook. There is value in know what my friends are doing, but the negative value of that hate isn't worth it.
I suffer using it because many people jumped ship from Craigslist to Facebook Marketplace.
Good deals and things can still certainly be found on Craigslist, and there seems to have been a rebound lately in use, but for a while there all that was left on Craigslist was old timers and resellers.
Simplest way for my Mom to keep track of what her extended family is up to and communicate with them. Changing would require all of them moving to a different platform.
yep, run a small non-tech business too (new for me) so I got to learn all about 'normie' FB marketing and it's absolutely trash from a business perspective
- we had this link limit for a few months already
- every business portal to upload content etc is super buggy, just shows loading spinners, you never know if a post has worked or not
- we're locked out of our instagram account as we took it over from old owners who don't know password and none of the reset options arrive even though they have access to them
- we finally got an email 2fa to go through to recover the account and that then asked for the SMS too, which never arrives
- there is of course absolutely no way to contact support
Unfortunately it's the only platform all our customers are on. They don't even have Google accounts, it's all WhatsApp, Facebook and phones.
And I just discovered today that posting a tweet via the X API costs $0.20 if it contains a link. They'll all head this way as they think they're too big to fail.
You either get stuck into facebook's tight grip on people's perpetual brain rot, or in google/apple's notification gardens. Welcome to the free and open internet.
I hate to devil's advocate this. But is the observed behavior of 'is this an outgoing link' the only practical way to defend against external bot advertising campaigns? Aside from Facebook obviously wanting you to pay them for advertising, how does any independent forum deal with this at scale without banning links?
So you have to pay a small amount of money to keep running your criminal enterprise? This would slightly raise the cost of doing business. Scams and banned goods already account for 10% of "Meta" revenues [1]. This move acknowledges that reality and creates a new rent-seeking behavior around it.
"how does any independent forum deal with this at scale without banning links?"
By banning spammers and scammers. Facebook opts not to ban scammers, as it's a significant portion of their revenue, and the latest AI slop is very good for engagement.
I could understand this for new pages, to crack down on spam, but for established pages? It makes no sense at all. As a cash grab, I get it, but it's not sustainable. Though maybe they are trying to crack down on pages taking over feeds, which I would support...but that would also require them cracking down on the AI slop pictures, etc in feeds.
This is a bi-directional play. For the vast majority that dont, this is an attempt to get more content INSIDE the facebook ecosystem as a moat, and for those that need outside content links they will pay since its a organic premium conversion.
Not defending it, just explaining the logic and why it might work even if it seems superficially stupid.
Interesting how 9.99 GBP (about 13.36 USD) will allow for "more than 2 links" in 2025, but 14.99 USD now will still only allow for 2 links. Users will need to pay for "advanced plan" at 49.99 USD per month just for 8 links.
They are in the squeezing what's left position for that platform. Young kids think of facebook like we think of myspace. Social media as a platform in fact may just be over. my kids don't really use social media, they use whatsapp/iphone groups.
in fact... maybe kids think of instagram as a boomer unc platform now too.
While it's been longer-lasting than many, social media is a fad and all fads eventually decline. Fundamentally it doesn't do anything that can't be done in a group chat. Thanks to the "forever memory" of the internet, people have learned the risks of posting anything where it will be scraped and preserved for eternity, ready to haunt you when it's most awkward.
Can we just stop using Facebook as a defacto business/organizational page? come on people. I've been login-gated from what should be public pages for the better part of a decade now.
On Google's Youtube to post links (like in video descriptions, etc) you have to pay by adding sellable/monetarily valuable personally identifying information to your account like a phone number and ID. Otherwise even with a google account from 2006 in good standing you can't post links anymore. Attempts to edit old video descriptions with HTTP/S links (from before the policy) also don't work.
I think this is far too charitable an interpretation. They could just ban spammers. Facebook doesn’t want links going off of their platform because they get paid for people staying on their platform and looking at ads.
I know it's all speculation, and this does come across as more monetization creep, but I can't help to wonder if there's an underlying reason beyond "line go up".
So it's not necessarily clickbait -- seems to be also an evolved workaround to fight throttling. :-/
Bluesky the company/app certainly isn't perfect, but the model they pioneer is very much designed to help fix this exact problem.
Yes!! You’re getting it! This is what they’re optimizing for. Have been for a decade plus.
Then downrank them.
I cannot wait until this whole FB trends ends. I want RSS feeds or blogs. Businesses should have their own basic websites that serve their needs.
Yes, it would be nice if FB fades into obscurity. But what would be nicer is if people had some basic decency and responsibility (everyone, me included) before posting clickbaity, flammable, junk stuff. I have no clue how to achieve this, but the internet used to be a fun place (for learning, niche topics/ideas etc) - those days are gone, and it sucks
Those comments you mentioned are a bit of a problem. Whenever admin complains about them I always say, "You're using Facebook. What do you expect? Only retired people, idiots, and bots are on there."
They never seem to understand what I'm talking about because, unfortunately, most of the folks in wildfire admin are 50+ years old
A fair number - not all - I am convinced are foreign trolls, or bots. There's something which just feels a bit different from a normal partisan, and the kinds of folks who invade every regional (town, county, etc.) group and post nonstop partisan dreck. Their profiles are off in some way, and the hours they are posting are all over the map.
FB does have the "big tent" thing going on, where they wanted to become the tool for every possible organizing principle. So you do get some of the legitimately most wacky people on the internet as well.
I hope to see turnkey organization oriented PDSes that let an admin management multiple accounts, and also host web pages with the same content that's distributed on network. Then gov posts has a web home and can be subscribed to in AT Proto apps.
My friend groups are all moving to Partiful to plan events for example because so many of us are getting off Facebook
Not the same as town level engagement obviously, but a sign the audience is moving
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45795104
I would say that the missing link in the discussion is that the valuable data they are mining is social networks and the fidelity of their data there is of a much higher fidelity than what FB or IG provides since these are in-person events, typically.
This is an entire arm of marketing research: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01482...
Also all those data promises go out the window as soon as they are acquired. Then it's Privacy Policy updates with retroactive addendums. Would be very surprised if that wasn't the ultimate goal.
Therefore "Facebook now charging to post more than 2 links a month" is false. It appears that this is some restriction applied to organic marketing.
I think the article says you can't post links from your FB page to external sites. What you're describing is the opposite: links from outside FB to an FB page. Of course they don't mind when you bring traffic to FB.
The thing about Facebook is that it's a far more functional social network than the popular alternatives. It's pretty much the go-to for running local community groups.
Meanwhile I haven't used it in 15+ years and don't ever feel the need for it. Probably in part because my better two-thirds has that side of things covered.
I think "Facebook is dead" is a trap for people who can only reason about the world through their own perspective.
When normal people noticed the tremendous drop in engagement from friends on their personal content, most of them stopped posting. So today, even if you find the hidden option (Feeds->Friends) that gives that feature, there’s nearly nothing of value left. For me, I have two friends still regularly posting, but 2/3 of their “posts” are just political links or reshares.
It is true that it is useful for things. I have groups about niche interests or local stuff that still function, but Meta could decide at any time to remove most group posts from the feed the same way they did with “friend posts” and links. If they do that, it will probably severely damage the usefulness of Facebook to people who use it for that kind of purpose, the same way as it did for people who used it to keep in touch with friends.
The only type of user that doesn’t need to worry is the one who wants to use Facebook as a lens to see popular viral content from strangers.
It's hard to imagine because when you're out, and peek back in, your account no longer contains strong interest signals, and so your feed contains absolute junk (scams, engagement bait, etc.)
Whereas a heavy user would see tailored and targeted (and one can argue, useful) posts.
I am in a few photography groups and see some photos people want comments on all the time and I'm always saying "It's not the length of the lens but how you use it" and stuff like that.
I find out about community events like local bands and broom dancing all the time on Facebook... Students do tell me though that they think it is dead.
Its ubiquitous for reselling.
The 2020s are a war on hyperlinks. It is particularly unfortunate to see this masquerading as a concern for safety and security (“everything outside of our platform is scary and insecure”)
I get that Facebook is trying to make some $$$ on them here, but I wasn't aware we had any war (not even a "war on Christmas" fake war) going on against links.
It's not only Facebook doing it, but they are probably the biggest offender.
And it's not like we are just spamming our own links, like I like to share links to news stories to my friends, family and followers.
They just realized 10 years ago that allowing people to click off-platform is terrible for engagement numbers, and they realized that they could just prevent it by silently suppressing such content.
https://dev.to/ascorbic/bring-back-the-twitter-link-preview-...
It's always like this. Just keep adding layers of friction until people don't bother. Engagement is still the obsession.
These people have arguably contributed nothing to society for over a decade (and maybe even made it worse in some instances) for very fat salaries, and yet they’re being praised for being the example of best engineers.
I periodically use their websites and they’re horrible!
Seriously, we should know better as the dev-tech society.
And I don’t give a darn about their research that is being built on top of barely legal mass surveillance so don’t tell me their contributions from stealing data were helpful.
How does this work fits with their mission of destroying the fabric of society and the mental well-being of teenagers, I cannot explain.
Meta's ultimate goal is immoral. It's not justified if a few projects do some good.
This is the funniest thing I’ve read on here.
They also work hard to force users into their walled gardens and to stop the useful content users to this day feed into they intentionally broken services from escaping into the real world wide web of hyperlinked and discoverable content.
In short they're at the forefront of making the internet harmful to society and less useful to almost everyone.
Their mission is to make Zuckerberg rich and powerful. That’s the sole purpose of Meta, everything else is incidental. It just so happens that they also destroy the fabric of society and the mental well-being of teenagers but it’s not their primary goal, they just don’t care about the side effect. It would be all the same if they were poisoning coral reefs and giving wedgies to grandmothers instead. As long as the process benefits Zuckerberg in the end, nothing else matters to the company.
We used to have something resembling a democracy, now we have an evolving neo-fascist hellscape created by a cabal of the least interesting tech people on the planet.
Meta earned a ton of goodwill by doing this -- it was very brave, and very influential. In my eyes, it outweighs everything negative they've ever done.
You can't study them, you can't modify them, you can't improve them, you can't look into how they are built etc.
Are you being sarcastic? Please let it be that you’re being sarcastic.
Naturally, they do it to earn "some respect" from those who otherwise see them clearly.
React, React Native, GraphQL, LLama, PyTorch, RocksDB, Cassandra, folly, Hack, HHVM, OCP, Presto, btrfs, cgroupsv2/PSI, eBPF, zstd, roughly 12% of all Linux kernel contributions are signed off by Meta + Meta is the 5th biggest contributor to Linux kernel.
Also a ton of other projects that did not originally come out of Meta but get a ton of patches and support/funding: MySQL, Memcached, Hadoop, LLVM, Systemd, Rust, Python etc.
Perhaps research a bit more before you make these ignorant comments.
From the messed up self-image issues they instill on children to the hand they played - either intentionally or through pure ignorance - in ethnic cleansing, I couldn't care less about what they've done in the tech space when those commits are signed in blood.
It's certainly possible to see the company as a net negative for society while also recognizing those contributions. One could even argue that that could simultaneously be the case, while the net effects of some particular devs working there are positive (though I could imagine reasonable arguments on both sides of that one).
My subtle point is that there are a lot of real reasons to dislike Meta. No reason to have hate blind you..
"Amnesty report finds Facebook amplified hate ahead of Rohingya massacre in Myanmar":
* https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/amnesty-report-finds-face...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_genocide#Facebook_con...
And React, although the jury remains out on whether that's a transformative technology or... not.
if you don't use zstd, all those deaths will be for nothing.
And now for the important question:
How does that make you feel? Because it is not about horrible deaths, is it? It is about you.
Heh.
edit:
I am not even baiting you man. I am just not sure why you have a beein your bonnet.
I don't know anything about the other things so I can't say if they are good or not. But acting as if react is some big invention is crazy. bell Labs gave us Unix and C. Meta isn't even close to inventing something like that.
You can have a lot of beef with react, but this is the lamest one. Of course it solves many problems, that's why it landed at the top. It took the C out of MVC, it made view rendering deterministic and simplified event management. It also stayed somewhat stable on the API side over the years.
I mean, Hack? Who cares?
For a fairly sizable portion of the population (especially the tech worker population), salary/TC is seen as the measure of someone's value as a human being. I've had acquaintances who really, sincerely struggled to understand the concept than an engineer making 1/N what an engineer at Meta/Google/etc does could be overall a better engineer. The typical reply has been something along the lines of "but if they're better, why don't they just make more money?"
They really couldn't understand when I tried to explain that, in my experience, nearly all the really brilliant and interesting technical people I knew tended to be making less, because they would rather work on interesting problems with a high degree of control than play leveling games at a large corporation.
The former is just wrong in the case of Meta, you don't need to look far to find many of their contributions. The latter is debatable, but it is not what you said.
There is also a difference between the company as a whole and the people working for it. Their "very fat salaries" can let them support noble causes, or not, they are people, in all their complexity, not just machine parts.
You’re arguably a war criminal either way, might as well get top dollar.
I’ll still take a half million dollar Meta job though.
Like, even in its heyday, it was such an attention trap, and it had very negative effects on the people who got addicted (especially teens).
But the site has gotten so much worse in the past couple years, and its brand is in the garbage. Maybe that's all for the best -- it was never really worth preserving.
There needs to be an easy to use low-cost, possible also advertisement driven, alternative that business can latch to so more can leave facebook.
I actively refuse to support Meta and block all their domain names in case of clicking on a tiny URL that sends me to their site. It also helps block their analytics used by 3rd parties. I will forever be a sunk cost for them.
Only because the longer you work there, probably the more you've been able to handle while you time there, but I don't really care if you worked at Meta or at Momandpop Software Corp down the road, I care about your personality and ability to learn and adapt, these are stronger signals of the types of devs I want to work with than anything else. I'd still consider you, but I might pass on you if I feel more confident about someone else.
I don’t think that’s a maybe. There’s actual research on social media addiction. For me, getting off Facebook improved my life.
Meta has a bad reputation in some circles, but I don't think there's anything peculiar or particularly evil about them, at least not worse than similar publicly traded big tech companies. They are amoral money-making entities.
That being said I agree that their products suck. I don't use them, besides what's app because it's difficult to avoid. It's also end to end encrypted so it doesn't really matter regarding mass surveillance.
React? We can all criticize it, but it has revolutionized the web. Llama. Did you forget what sparked the whole open-weight wave? It was that. I dislike Meta, but I would not criticize the engineers competence. They have done impressive things, check out their blog if you genuinely are curious.
Now to load a simple website that in the past was a few kB of HTML, CSS and JS you need to download Mb of JS code. Now the browser needs to use Mb of RAM just to display a stupid webpage.
For what? It was better when we had PHP pages that did produce HTML on the server side.
Another thing to me that we have to get Meta discredit for, not something good in any way.
Personally I hate what react has done to the web.
For how unoriginal, unreactive, and mind-numbingly iterative over virtual DOM React is, it should be named Repeat.
"Things seem to hang on in computing just because they work a little bit." -Alan Kay
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8841428
Alan Kay also said this about his famous "Point of View is worth 80 IQ points" aphorism, which I think poignantly explains why React costs a net of 160 IQ points compared to Svelte:
>I have been keeping to "80" IQ points in the saying (thus avoiding inflation). However very few people have noticed there is no sign bit in the aphorism, and that it works just as well for "poor perspectives being worth negative 80 IQ points" (and I think we could claim inflation of stupidity in many bad directions these days ...).
Rich Harris: Rethinking Reactivity:
https://svelte.dev/blog/svelte-3-rethinking-reactivity
>There are some important technical differences (as I explain in the video above, React is not reactive) but conceptually it’s the same thing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdNJ3fydeao
> I seriously can’t understand why there’s so much respect for anyone that works at Meta.
Is there? Thats new for me.
> yet they’re being praised for being the example of best engineers
Are they? I associate meta with the “move fast and break things” philosophy, not engineering excelence.
I’m sure there are some fine engineers there. But by and large it is just a big company with questionable ethics and lots of money.
Not as FB. But they have shipped a lot of useful stuff. That doesn't mean the company is suddenly great and all should be forgiven but there is some nuance here.
So now it's "pay $50 to post 2 links" but does that guarantee them showing it to your followers and friends? If NOT -- is that sufficient reason for a fraud lawsuit?
But from a technical perspective, Google breaks constantly. Here's one. On Pixel you could use Assistant to start a timer or open an application. For years. Then Gemini is forced (first opt in, then forced, as is the Google Way)- there's no way to turn off voice out loud response, and opening apps - the most basic thing - doesn't work.
Then you have long-standing headaches like Gmail interface, reports of people's businesses getting blocked on Google Workspace, etc.
Facebook is blamed for that data broker scandal and making us hate our families due to political arguments. Google does all the same data broker stuff, and other than not being a forever scroll social media site, it's morally and technically repugnant.
It ain't the same as the Bell Labs days. They try to larp as if they are the computer scientists of old but none of them are. They are just there for the salary and prestige and that's it.
Now tell me where else can I find such a company having that?
I only care about competitive programming and solve algorithm problem. Nothing else matter: I don't care about product, frontend, security, data pipeline, bla bla nonsense.
And by the way, $400k+ salary in cash and RSU please. No stock options, thank you.
And by the way, you fought through all of that for a $15k-20k ARR contract. Never again, thank you.
Oh, and the PMs are just drones sitting in a room doing nothing but talks and herding the engineers like chicken, and try to claim credits for all the work engineers do. Never met a competent PM in my life.
By whom? I haven't seen anyone say something positive about Meta or their employees for at least 15 years, unless you count people who were being paid to write PR articles.
That two libraries already build Frontend and AI.
And yes, I mean facebook.com
Pretty much in the same way that a significant number of people in tech who wants a good paying job looks up to people working for Zuckerberg.
The amount of fake link spam, "link in comments" spam, misleading shit, is endless.
No amount of anti-spam technology is going to help. Cold hard cash requirement might do something about it.
If you assume that the only reason to run a fake celebrity page, for example, is to mislead users into some action, this might help there. Though actually what is needed there is a similar price pattern on posting email addresses.
Bot 1: “I have been using the services of Mr Bob John who is a financial advisor, he has made me $70,000 in the past six months. Very trustworthy”
Bot 2: “Oh wow! Will you please share how I can contact him?”
Bot 1: “sure, you can message him on Telegram. His username is BobJohn983739257”
Bot 3: “I have also used Mr Bob John services. He has been a reliable and faithful advisor.”
I think you could more or less instaban users who mention Telegram and nothing of value would be lost.
I see comment likes and replies from users called "Congratulations you've won…" or "Message me to win your prize" and if you report those, they are actually pretty much always removed (easy pattern I guess).
But nobody seems to have any luck with reporting fake celebrity scams, to the point that if you are a well-known user who has more comments than you can reply to, you more or less have to regularly post a video saying "I will never message you directly".
The threshold isn't for your grandpa, it's for Facebook Pages, which are basically landing pages for businesses on Facebook. And I think it's chosen very deliberately: so that you can set up your page for free, promote it, and then realize you need to pay to keep it alive.
Yes, I understood this, thanks.
It doesn't at all change my point: one of Facebook's biggest problems is deceptive pages that clone user content for clout, mislead users and then ultimately direct them for scams.
If you set a limit of five posts a month without paying, you would perhaps only punish fake pages, which are a high volume game.
Remember from their own mouths the social aspect of the thing is dead... is only the manipulation, and now you can "tune" the interactions with LLMs so you hear exactly what someone pays for you to hear...
source: https://www.facebook.com/help/1929252614431792
1. This will force users to keep sharing 2. get more ADs revenue 3. People get fed up and switch to $50/ month plan
similar to how Youtube did. I am fed up and ended up signing upf or youtube premimum.
I don't miss it, though I feel uncomfortable about the situation. Recovery has not been worth the time involved.
What sucks is that now I can't see a whole ton of local content: local event organizers, small businesses, municipal offices and agencies, community groups, etc. have all consolidated on "facebook" as where every announcement goes.
I hope they continue to make it a more obviously hostile walled garden and that organizations of all kinds move away. The network effect it has may be hard to overcome, however.
Never mind the fact his platform has routinely chipped away at privacy in the past, posts suspiciously going from Friends to Friends of Friends or Public. Like you can set it and it will straight up come unset
But it's totally cool to just lock things down for accounts only if you're Facebook, and never mind people get banned all the time for bullshit, horrible things that people report are never taken down, and it's apparently increasingly impossible to even make a new account
It's very much a bandwagon mentality. "We" is you.
I still remember when Facebook Pages were promoted as an alternative to feeds and newsletters. You could follow a page and be sure to receive all updates from them. Now you even have to pay to share links.
The few groups I'm in, local wildlife and pet bird groups, mainly consist of people asking questions that need to and are usually answered by posting links to local resources or regulations.
I've been researching local newspapers, and the problems they face, lately, and one of them is that none of the social media sites allow them to get any visits from their followers because they either significantly de-rank posts with links off-site or it costs money to reach followers with links, or both. Of course Google scraping their sites and summarizing is another symptom of the same problem; FAANG wants all the revenue and a monopoly on what you see. Every penny every eyeball. None for small businesses, none for independent media, none for individuals.
The way I saw it put recently: the internet used to be a library and now it's a store.
So many pages link out to other things, including major news sites.
This will either get reverted or Facebook will die. Mark's choice.
Good deals and things can still certainly be found on Craigslist, and there seems to have been a rebound lately in use, but for a while there all that was left on Craigslist was old timers and resellers.
- we had this link limit for a few months already
- every business portal to upload content etc is super buggy, just shows loading spinners, you never know if a post has worked or not
- we're locked out of our instagram account as we took it over from old owners who don't know password and none of the reset options arrive even though they have access to them
- we finally got an email 2fa to go through to recover the account and that then asked for the SMS too, which never arrives
- there is of course absolutely no way to contact support
Unfortunately it's the only platform all our customers are on. They don't even have Google accounts, it's all WhatsApp, Facebook and phones.
You get both the safety of a public place to meet and identity verification through your post office representative
Seems like a win for everyone and we get FB out of the way
Engineers are enablers at best. If you are not trapped there by visa issues or vesting problems you should take your money and RUN.
https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...
By banning spammers and scammers. Facebook opts not to ban scammers, as it's a significant portion of their revenue, and the latest AI slop is very good for engagement.
I barely use fb as it is and this will just drive me off the platform entirely
Generating slop content is cheap now, but you need to store it and very few people will see it, so you can't show more ads.
Not defending it, just explaining the logic and why it might work even if it seems superficially stupid.
* Facebook with this and its new scraping rules for business accounts
* Turning Venezuela into a fiefdom
* Skydance merger
and on and on. But it's not late stage. It's just capitalism and we'll be reading about the same behavior 10 years from now.
Nothing much left to innovate.
https://www.facebook.com/help/1929252614431792/
in fact... maybe kids think of instagram as a boomer unc platform now too.
We have the internet and that's not good enough
You already throttle posts - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14147719
You already act as a piss-poor communications medium https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6090712
Is "Metaverse" open web/open protocol? Or just yet another way for Zuckerberg to fuck people over?
Those hyperlinks ain't free, you know.
Embrace, extend, extinguish