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.
Sure, just self-host the entire thing away from Bluesky for only ~$150/month; it'll only take a few terabytes of space to do so [0]. The best part is the link at the top of that thread is broken, indicating that even the people that really care, still don't care enough to keep up with costs and maintenance.
I'm asking about every part of the full Bluesky stack because in the scenario that "Bluesky starts monetizing users" means if you self-host just part of the stack, and continue to rely on any portion of Bluesky's stack for your server... well, it's pretty obvious where the pressure and forced monetization will go to.
The above is why I'm intentionally ignoring all other threads about hosting just one portion of Bluesky. It being easy to self-host, say, a Personal Data Server, means that won't be the portion Bluesky builds monetization in to. The part of the stack that an extremely small number of people are willing and able (technically and financially) to host long-term, and are seen as good stewards worthy of users' trust, will be the part that starts abusing users.
Is there a cheaper method of self-hosting the entire stack I should look at, or is this seriously being pitched as something average home-labbers can do?
EDIT: Oh cool, it gets better. This [1] guide from ~2024 suggests an OVH server, also ringing in (at the time) at ~$150/month. Looking at the suggested configuration now, it's $367.98CAD / month. But please, tell me more about how if Bluesky needs to show an ROI, everyone'll start self-hosting PDS' and Relays
That's one way in which ActivityPub wins over ATProto.
It's about as easy and cheap to self-host Mastodon, Pleroma, Misskey, etc... as it is most blog or forum software. It's only resource-intensive if you follow accounts or aggregators that post a ton of media, and even then unlikely to need more than single-digit terabytes of storage.
I wonder if people will ever go back to Diaspora and host their own pods. For about $40/month you can host up to about 1,500 users. I did it for a little while on a basic package for like $15/month and the directions to install are fairly straight forward and the community is really helpful.
The issue I ran into wasn't cost of hosting, it was getting people to move off whatever platform they were already on - regardless of how much better it was for controlling their own data and privacy.
Great! And this provider will just... eat the server, bandwidth, and storage costs, indefinitely, with no expectation of financial renumeration? Or will they charge a minimal fee that few social media users will be willing to pay?
My point stands: Hosting a full Bluesky stack is big money, every month. And that ignores how the admin must be seen in a positive light; having deep pockets isn't enough, the admin team running (and paying for) the servers must be trusted not to manipulate what gets seen, who gets banned, and what links are deemed malicious.
$150/month is a lot of money, but split just 100 ways, that's $1.50/month. If the user base is too expensive, emotionally, to do free server administration for, well, why would you want to do that job then at all? Which speaks volumes.
It's the payment onboarding that's usually the sticking point (which is fortunate for my side of the discussion, because you've missed a zero), but that also misses that hosting costs will almost certainly scale with user-count.
And I'm not discussing emotionally-heavy, but public standing within the community you've convinced to trust you with their social media algorithm
In your view, contrary to the lobster.rs post, running the server should instead cost $1,500/month and goes up exponentially to support a handful of users. Have I got you right?
How is having a good public standing to a very vocal minority about modern day sensitive topics not a high emotional cost to bear?
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.
On the other hand, if we assume that Facebook and Google need to make some money, and people aren't willing to pay to use them, and people don't want ads to overshadow the algorithm, and people don't want to pay with their data, and...
What's the actual solution? What would an ethically run Google look like? I'm not even going to ask for Facebook, because I'm not convinced it's possible.
I think some part of this is anti-bot. They don't have a good solution to this yet, I and someone else I know got a lifetime ban from Meta just from opening an account.
No actions / no posts. I guess they determined the way we opened the account was too bot like. Sucks because we're real people that were trying to buy Meta ads.
But maybe doing something like this allows them to ease those restrictions, and then by charging for posts they have an ability to determine bots from non-bots in a more robust way. I'm doubtful it will actually work - because bots are exactly the type of thing that can and will try to open dozens of accounts to get around the 2 posts per month limit.
People put the link in the comments because Facebook won't let you link to news sites in posts because they can't be posted in certain countries. So, putting the link in the comments was a workaround for that issue.
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.
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.
Is it possible that these are real people who are unwell? I can imagine a situation where users who spend a lot of time (like, to an obsessive degree) viewing and commenting on regional content start getting recommendations for more similar posts, regardless of whether it's local to them not. If there's enough users like this - and I'm sure there are - Facebook might even start treating them as a demographic, effectively creating a sort of self-organizing trolling group.
An account which seems like it was a normal account for like 10 years. Maybe it leans a bit in the direction of the content it is currently posting. But, it was mostly dormant for a few years. Then, it started posting a high volume of partisan content. It otherwise seems to be a real person, just it one day started posting hardcore partisan materials all over the regional groups (usually multiple). It's fishy.
Another one: An account which superficially seems to be a real account, except that it's got a generic enough name you can't pin down which person with that name it might be. Nothing about their profile identifies them as anyone in particular. They may have a lot of friends, but they don't appear to be people who know them IRL - just randos. Their profile feed is a mix of normal stuff and partisan stuff. What they post to groups is 100% hardcore partisan stuff. Their profile is very light on photos of themself, and always kind of low quality. There's never a photo of a place you can pin down to a real location. These don't tend to be accounts that have been around more than a year or three. Again, it's fishy.
Like I mentioned, in both cases, you'll see the accounts posting at odd hours for where they supposedly live.
They could be real people, or sophisticated trolling operations. TBH, the reason I lean more towards the latter is because Facebook is so goddamned lax about any kind of enforcement. Do I think someone could set up a bunch of fake profiles and operate them for years, all from the same Chinese or Russian IP address with locations all in the US, and Facebook would never ban them despite the accounts getting flagged? Yes, that is extremely easy to believe. If it drives engagement (and troll accounts do!), it's likely to be allowed to continue.
I'd be the happiest man on the internet for a split second if someone who works for Meta tromps on in here with a burner account and tells me I'm being an idiot, that they're fighting hard against troll armies and bots, that it's just a super hard problem because the troll/bot networks are so sophisticated. Hasn't happened yet.
Most all recommendation algorithms definitely do not care about locality of reference.
If I watch some local-to-me news stories about libraries, the algorithm decides that I like news about libraries, and begins to suggest library-related videos from all over the USA. It does not care that I only cared about libraries in Phoenix and San Diego.
Likewise, there is this one English teacher who is absolutely gorgeous and I only watch her videos to see her talk. But of course, YouTube got the idea that I like English instructional videos from anyone, anywhere, and the algorithm slowly fills my feed with videos from instructors who are not the lady I like. It's crazy, I tell ya.
I'm not on FB anymore. But when I was, I got interested in Irish topics, and it was often family research-related, and so I'd be studying some esoteric topic in a very small town in a specific county of Ireland, and of course, the recommendation engine would blossom with completely irrelevant Pages and Groups from every corner of the Republic, for no reason except to bait me into engagement.
And that's all it is, engagement bait. They on the other side of the algorithm, they know for sure that you don't actually care about those topics or locations. But they are simply trying to dangle stuff in front of you like a largemouth bass, and eventually something will enrage you or you'll need to correct someone's spelling, or make an angry face emoji on a post, and then they have your engagement, and that's all they really wanted from you.
Not to inform you, or entertain you, but to engage your shit until you absolutely lose your temper. That's what they want on social media.
This may not be the best place for this, but I run forth.news -- we publish primary sources, like releases/alerts from governments. (IPAWS -- the emergency alert system -- for example, is here: https://www.forth.news/lists/ipaws)
If there are PIOs/PAOs here who are looking for a new place to share alerts (for free), I'd love to chat. Our audience is growing quickly, and we can be a replacement for Facebook/Twitter/any other site making it more difficult for constituents to read alerts.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
It was extraordinarily telling when Nazi musk showed country flags to IP on shitter. The amount of astroturfing happening to local discussions is terrible. And who is doing this? Countries where 1$ is a day's or 2 days propaganda wages.
And my community is one of those "only facebook" government messaging areas. And what do they get? 1/2 are real locals, the other half who knows. But what I do know, is that they smell like AI created profiles, and primed for propaganda.
I recently signed up to NextDoor, since I'm not even on FB anymore.
Not that NextDoor is any less toxic or useful, but your hyperlocal government agencies may be signed up there, as well. NextDoor has a dedicated "Public Agencies" tab/feed where you can ignore all the hoi polloi, if you so wish.
Many "real accounts" on NextDoor actually disclose their home neighborhood, although I have no idea if/how they filter out the liars and impostors and bots.
On official announcements from a municipal government? Yes. Imagine a scenario like...
Foo Town: boil water advisory for Tuesday. The water department has noted a risk of harmful pathogens in tap water and recommends boiling water for 2 minutes before consumption all day Tuesday.
Commenter: It's all those [racial slur]s shitting in the reservoir. If that [expletive] police chief doesn't run them out of town, we're going to have to round them up and shoot them!
Assume the commenter has done this enough times to figure out what the platform's moderation will catch and what it won't. The town would probably like to be able to do some additional moderation.
Might get banned? Sure. Would get banned? No. You can’t say that with certainty. From my own experience reporting comments exactly like that the automated report is almost always closed the first time. If I appeal to a human reviewer (if they still have those?) it’s a 30/70 chance, 70 being the chance the report is closed again since “this doesn’t violate our…”
> Not to mention that’s a gigantic strawman.
A strawman of what? Are you claiming this doesn’t happen or do you just have qualms with the frequency claimed that it happens? I encounter deplorable comments like that daily. Granted I’m one data point but you haven’t presented your data points that lead you to conclude GP’s comment is a gigantic strawman.
It’s a strawman because you went for the absolute worst comment. If towns had the power to remove comments from their pages, 99.9% of the time it would be used to remove comments that criticise the local government. I’d rather read the occasional deranged tirade thank you.
> That goes against Facebook policies and the account would get banned.
lol. the "lol" isn't directed at you. I'm not laughing at you. But FB is infamous for "we will ban you due to some stupid innocuous or mostly innocuous thing but you can report the worst things imaginable and that 'doesn't violate community standards'
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…
The only challenge now is that those small websites can practically be DDOS'ed by AI crawlers. If not for denial of service, then to rack up hosting bill.
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.
I'm 48 years old, and I know Facebook is still strong in developing countries. There are also some provinces outside the capital cities where everything still revolves around Facebook. But every time I've checked since 2019, everything has seemed pretty much dead. And I'm not even counting Europe, where it's completely dead.
Instagram is a garbage platform now, too. I used it back when it was just a feed of the people I follow. Every few months I'll click an Instagram link sent to me by someone else, and then I'll check my feed out of morbid curiosity, and it's 70% promoted/recommended posts from people I don't know.
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.
"Dead" is a relative measure. When I used it heavily (roughly 2004-2015 or so), most of my friends were active on there, and would post things (interesting or otherwise) multiple times per day or at least near-daily.
Nowadays I sign into my FB account every 3-6 months or so to find something specific about someone, and I see that my feed is dominated by 4-5 people (out of around 1,000 "friends"). If I'm curious and start searching for other friends specifically, nearly all of of them have not posted in years.
Sure, there are some active community-type spaces there, but that is a very small part of what FB used to be.
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.
I don't know what you are talking about, in my locale and community (coastal SoCal) it is practically essential for keeping on tops of events and learning about potential gigs. Making a facebook post is about the most reliable method I have for broadcasting a message to my friends. Most everybody is still on it. I am an elder millenial.
Yeah, a couple of months after I graduated in 2015, it was dead, 5 years after that, same as profile images everywhere, nothing changed, immediately abandoned after the forced school interactions lmao
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.
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.
I never said they were open source. Everything else you wrote is factually incorrect.
When you run a proprietary program (like Adobe Photoshop or a closed-source game) on your PC, you get a compiled binary of machine code. The high-level logic is stripped out, variables are obfuscated, and the EULA legally forbids you from decompiling, reverse-engineering, or modifying the binary.
With an open model, you get the actual Python/C++/CUDA code defining the exact mathematical structure of the model. And you get a weights file, which is an unencrypted, open array of floating-point numbers representing every synaptic strength in the network.
So you can inspect the exact mathematical state of the model at any arbitrary moment during inference -- in other words, you can study open models. You can fine-tune or quantize them -- in other words, you can improve them quite significantly! And much much more.
I am serious. I believe that the LLM is the defining technology of our time -- at least as important and as impactful as the internet itself -- and that Meta's opening of LLaMa has profoundly changed the landscape for the better.
> 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.
> 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).
Your local community also probably doesn't know or care a lot about water purification, power distribution, standardized shipping, or the myriad other technologies that make society work.
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.
Friend, there is no better. There is just this. I know it is hard for you to hear me, but hear me for I do have something to tell you.
We do not live in a perfect world. That is a simple fact, but I need you to accept that fact before we have a chance to communicate. I don't mean me reading, you responding ad infinitum. No. I mean communicating.
Can you do that for me? Because if you are gonna give me tired binary choices along the lines of:
1) would you rather have a cookie
2) would you rather go to work
It is not much of a choice. It is a cute rhetoric, but it is not the reality in which we live.
> Friend, there is no better. There is just this. I know it is hard for you to hear me, but hear me for I do have something to tell you.
This sub-thread started with:
> Zstd is worth a lot of other's people's pain.
The (philosophical/theoretical) debate/discussion is about the 'quantity' of "people's pain", and how much of it is it worth for having Zstd (and other things that have come out of Meta/FB). What is the 'trade-off' (if any) between getting good and accepting evil? (Assuming "good" and "evil" even exist.)
I prefer a world where we have to live with zlib, lz4, and xz but have less genocide. I get that I didn't get a vote in which world we have, but I do have an opinion. And you do, too.
"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!!!!"
If it took you pulling the trigger, how many people would you murder to make a slightly better compression algorithm?
If you outsourced the murder to someone else, how many people would you be OK with murdering?
Wouldn't it be better if we didn't continue to support corporations who enable genocide around the world?
Now, ultimately I'll still end up using zstd. I'm not happy about it's ties to Facebook. But it's code that exists out there now, I don't see the reason to not use it. But I'll still try and avoid giving Facebook any money or praise. I don't give praise to Facebook engineers, at least not ones recently working there. They're massively paid in blood money, and they should already understand that by now. Their products hurt societies around the world, and they don't actually change.
You're wearing shoes, aren't you? Own a smartphone? Drive a hybrid? Use a computer? Ever eaten a banana? Bought something from Amazon? Turned on the air conditioning? Somewhere down those supply chains, someone suffered for your convenience. Every purchase is an atrocity by proxy. Every breath is stolen oxygen. Every step displaces an innocent insect. Your very existence is an ongoing ecological war crime. And you have the audacity to sit there, wearing pants assembled by strangers, pretending your hands are clean?
Not currently, no. But when I do, I do bother actually trying to check sources. The last things on my feet were sandals purchased from the people who actually made them.
> Every purchase is an atrocity by proxy.
I mean, I understand tHeRe Is nO eThIcAl CoNsUmPtIoN uNdEr CaPitAlIsM. Sure. But when you know a specific supplier is a bad actor, has been pointed out as a bad actor, and refuses to change, do you continue to support that bad actor when you have tons of options? Do you continue choosing to champion them on forums online, despite knowing their entire product line is "we're going to throw kids into an emotionally damaging blender, sow discontent in your community, help ruin mental health globally, support genocidal maniacs overseas, spread massive disinformation, and overall damage everything you care about!"
Do you just pour your used motor oil down the storm drains because, hey, the environment is fucked anyways, or do you at least try to reduce your impact?
And once again, I even mentioned I'll continue to use zstd. I totally get that by using zstd I'm not directly supporting these things. But acting like "hey Facebook is great and its perfectly fine tons of people died directly to finance zstd's development" is IMO a bad take on the whole situation.
So once again I ask, if it took you pulling the trigger, how many people would you personally murder to have zstd be financed, since you seem perfectly OK with trading human lives for compression algorithms? Or would you argue we shouldn't be trading lives for compression algorithms in the first place, and we should press on those corporations who do make money off such things to stop doing so instead of arguing we should just accept it?
<< I even mentioned I'll continue to use zstd. I totally get that by using zstd I'm not directly supporting these things. But acting like "hey Facebook is great and its perfectly fine tons of people died directly to finance zstd's development" is IMO a bad take on the whole situation.
Apologies, it is possible that I mistook you for another zealot. I obviously don't really disagree, but I find the holier than thou stance difficult to approach neutrally.
<< if it took you pulling the trigger, how many people would you personally murder to have zstd be financed,
This doesn't square with your "Zstd is worth a lot of other's people's pain" earlier statement. So what is it, you just don't care to actually be the one to inflict such pain? You're entirely OK with the idea that by championing zstd and telling people "its worth a lot of other's people's pain", knowing that by other's people's pain we're talking genocide, suicide, and deaths due to misinformation, so long as its not you specifically having to do that? Why is that?
You've already stated its definitely worth it. Just not worth it for you to pull the trigger, but worth it enough for you to champion somebody else to pull the trigger?
Personally I'd never say a compression algorithm is worth a genocide.
<< I even mentioned I'll continue to use zstd. I totally get that by using zstd I'm not directly supporting these things. But acting like "hey Facebook is great and its perfectly fine tons of people died directly to finance zstd's development" is IMO a bad take on the whole situation.
Then, based on your line of argumentation, you are simply a hypocrite; very pedestrian ( I am personally disappointed ). You are perfectly ok with using zstd knowing that it indirectly supports company and the evil deeds it bestows upon the world while knowing it to be true AND lecturing others about the evil deeds they do.
<< You've already stated its definitely worth it. Just not worth it for you to pull the trigger, but worth it enough for you to champion somebody else to pull the trigger?
Again, are you using a computer terminal to type those letters in? Are those letters worth the lives that made it possible for you to have this philosophical treatise on why you feel morally superior to me?
Yes? Then maybe you shouldn't, because you explicitly are not.
You are just like all the other kids out there unable to actually stand by what you claim to believe.
Me? I just live it.
<< Personally I'd never say a compression algorithm is worth a genocide.
You know.. I have rather fascinating realization. Maybe it is true that you would never say it. That is simply not done. You would just let it happen should the compression compressed enough. How do I know? You already stated you will continue to use it.
> I totally get that by using zstd I'm not directly supporting these things.
I'm not supporting Facebook by using a library that's freely available on the public internet and hosted by others. I'm not out there saying its worth the genocide. I actively try and avoid giving Facebook any amount of actual value from me and the things I touch. If you can point to how me using a package pulled from some debian package host is actively supporting Facebook, I'll try and reduce my consumption of the library.
> You are just like all the other kids out there
Ah, an ad hominem. I didn't expect better.
> you are simply a hypocrite
I am no perfect person and agree at times I am a hypocrite. I acknowledge the basics of the concept tHeRe iS nO sUcH tHiNg As eThIcAl cOnSuMpTuIoN uNdEr cApItAlIsm, and ultimately almost every product I buy can probably trace some amount of its lineage to the suffering of others. I do think to a certain extent some of that amount of suffering is inherently impossible to avoid in the world of globalized supply chains, and ultimately I will end up consuming something connected to it. But if there's a choice of company A that causes X amount of societal damage and company B that causes 2X amount of societal damage, and you can freely choose between them, which do you choose? Do you go online and directly argue company B's products are definitely worth the extra human suffering?
> How do I know? You already stated you will continue to use it.
I use it because its there, open source, and freely available. Because, sure, you're right, it exists regardless of the suffering at this point. If they charged even a penny for a lifetime license I wouldn't use it, because I don't want to support Meta or companies like them if I have the choice. Same goes for lots of other corporations which I feel are directly bad actors, have been called out for being a bad actor, and I can actually choose a different supplier or eliminate such a thing from my life.
Using an open-source library already in the public space isn't the same as supporting a corporation. Going on a forum and saying their products are worth genocide and excusing their bad actions is supporting that corporation. Do you not see the difference? Is installing MariaDB supporting Oracle, as some amount of the code traces a lineage to codebases now owned by Oracle?
> Me? I just live it.
You're not "just living it" though. You're actively saying a compression library is worth a genocide, so long as you don't have to pull the trigger. If they came to you and said "we'll make you a better compression algorithm, but we'll support a genocide on the other side of world to finance its development", would you choose to take that trade? Is such a thing is OK with you, that it doesn't really matter to try and push suppliers to be better, because its worth it? If not, please do correct me, but that's definitely what I'm understanding from our conversation.
Ultimately if they came to me with that choice, I'd say no. Please stop supporting genocide and social unrest around the world would be my response. I'll continue with whatever compression library I already have, or maybe go try and get someone else to make a better one. I wouldn't just think "hey its worth it to trade human lives for financing software development".
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.
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.
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 can acknowledge that someone is intelligent, skilled, or talented without respecting them or their decision to apply their intelligence, skills, or talent to an ignoble cause.
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.
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.
You also use your phone that requires cobalt mined by child labor, wear clothes made by slave labor in countries like Vietnam and Bangladesh etc, so what's your point? The world is not black and white.
Original comment you responded to said "> [Meta] have arguably contributed nothing to society for over a decade" and you responded with a list of tech that is supposed to indicate their contribution. I'm not impressed. I'm also not impressed by fast fashion and child labor phones. Big Tech has been a scourge and 20% less web traffic because of zstd does not absolve them.
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.
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 mean, squarespace and similar services exist. Sure, there's a fee associated, but compared to even the costs of running a small coffee bar it's negligible. I could understand this argument in the 2000s and early 2010s; setting up a website meant engaging with a web consultant or similar IT agency, and there were yearly maintenance costs. It wasn't out of reach for most businesses, but it was expensive enough that a Facebook page was a genuine cost savings.
Anymore, putting up a basic template page for your business is maybe 2-3 hours if you're really non-technical. Sure, it will be just the basic template, but there's very little need for more customization than that. That hypothetical coffee bar really just needs a place to post hours, their menu, and maybe update with specials if they're ambitious. That's about all you get with a Facebook page anyway, there's zero customization.
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.
> 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 ...).
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.
To Meta workers -- and I've known many of you, right up to the c-suite.
If you still work there, you're a garbage human being. It's that simple. You are a POS that deserves no harbor or shelter from any right-thinking tech worker.
(All here have noticed how you no longer highlight your workplace. Apparently shame is useful for something, if not enough.)
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.
> 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.
At least Google lets me install Projectivy Launcher on the device I paid for so I never have to see a single ad on my TV. And use ADB to customize those branded OEM remote buttons for HBO/Netflix/etc to do what I want instead.
Plus sideload apps like Smarttube to watch ad-free YouTube that would never be allowed on Play Store/App Store for either Android/iOS.
User hostile stuff out of the box is much less aggravating to me if I'm also provided the means to bypass it. Even if it's mildly inconvenient to setup, it's still vastly better than the alternative.
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.
Yeah, I don't know if they're incredibly good engineers. We know they may have gone to Ivy League schools and for sure are excellent at algorithms during job interviews.
I applied there a long time ago and they seemed more interested in my math background and schooling and coding than my work experience.
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.
There's nothing better about working at Meta than working at Flock or X or Kalshi or Palantir, it's pretty clear that Meta has done far more damage than all 3 combined due to scale. The problem is that many more people on HN have worked at Meta or know someone who has, so coming to terms with that would be painful, so they rather not. It's not too different for people outside tech who pretend to care about these things, but instead of knowing people who work there they're active users of Meta platforms. And I guess the open source contributions give a convenience excuse to techies, as if they make up for even 0.1% of the damage.
This is also why criticism of Meta tends to get a much worse vote ratio in comments on HN than for the other companies I named, lots of people here with direct personal connections to them due to scale.
Meta just added another chapter to their endless list, election interference in Brazil to help Bolsonaro. Just like X.
> 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
It wasn't that Sears was unable to adapt to new realities, they merely had a incompetent hedge fund manager CEO who was unable to separate his fantasy world of Objectivist delusions from reality. He tried to implement a management structure based on Ayn Rand novels, with predictable results. Sears didn't die a natural death, it was the victim of yet another Objectivist murder.
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.
Not just Pages, but I've read this is also coming to any user who at some point in the past clicked the prompt to turn their account into a "pro" one. I did it long ago, just to see what info it would give me; then found little of interest, and forgot about it. Since then people have followed me who didn't friend me. Now, I can revert to a non-pro account (gaining ability to post more than 2 links) but I'd lose all the non-friend followers. Whatever. It's amazing how much junk FB is now. My feed is mostly crap from people/pages I don't follow and have no interest in.
So is this a kite for one way to commercialize all of Meta's platforms? Or perhaps just a way to kill off a dead business under the guise of a failed experiment?
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 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.
And my point is that they don't want to punish scammers, they want to get money from businesses. In that view, the limit is not absurd, it's pretty carefully calibrated to make sure that every business with an active Facebook Page needs to pay (but not before they get set up).
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
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.)
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.
I really hope this makes business websites great again. And using Google Maps to publish business updates. The number of times I've gone to a business during their open hours only to learn that they're closed and that the update was published to Facebook or Instagram is absurd.
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.
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.
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...
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.
I’d be very satisfied with a store. It’s more like a bazaar where half the patrons are pickpockets and half the stalls are selling counterfeit stuff that will harm you. And there are no police to protect you from any of that (though you do get temporarily ejected if you say words that aren’t allowed, like “kill” or “rape” - in any context including honest reporting).
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.
Probably an unpopular take, but this is not a bad thing. Maybe weird on it being for link sharing, but it’s always been deeply anticompetitive to offer a free webpage. It’s bad for the market for them to set the price of hosting a webpage for a business at zero, and the network effects make it easier for them to lock businesses in
Right, but my opinion is that they should charge everyone. This is at least a step in that direction. It’s not “punishing” anyone, it’s making just making it more clear that instead of money they want you to pay with engagement. Apparently 2 links a month is enough of a loss in engagement that the marginal cost of hosting their page outweighs the value Meta gains from having that business on the platform for “free”.
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 mean, this isn't really a surprise. On many social media platforms, you get instantly banned/shadowbanned if you post an external link, if you can publish that post in the first place at all. From the platform's perspective, there is almost no incentive to allow external links (spam, leakage etc). There is no law to mandate that third party links must be allowed.
I don't like this but also don't see how this can be different in the real world.
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.
I’d be highly skeptical that more than 2% of the posts Mom sees are by her family or friends. Ads, posts by strangers, groups I’m in - those are 90% of what the algorithm serves on the main feed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I hope you're right. I do wish there was another way to get to what you are describing besides the same strong-arm tactics that the U.S. used to subjugate many other countries in Latin America: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
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.
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.
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.
The problem is that it’s the only thing slightly webpage-shaped that is free and extremely easy to make/edit. (Yes, I know that it I’m putting the bar extremely low because it’s an incredibly limiting platform)
You or I could put up an html site and host it on Cloudflare Workers for a total cost of 0 + the domain reg. But mom and pop don’t even know what html is and are too cheap to pay $500 (and some ongoing cost to a local “we build and host your website” firm to do it.
They could probably pay for Squarespace and just tell an AI “here’s a Word doc of my menu, build me a site for my restaurant” but Squarespace just isn’t free.
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 don’t know whether to be glad about this because of how horrifying YouTube’s spam problem is, or annoyed because it isn’t helping since their comments are what’s full of rampant fraud spam of every kind.
Honestly, the best thing YouTube could do to help protect users would be to shift to moderated comments only. If the video creator or their designated moderator doesn’t choose to explicitly show a comment, it should go in a black hole. Or even better, offer a service for a small fee relative to your channel’s revenue, which uses a Gemini flash model to approve on-topic comments. Creators can choose to invest either their time or their money, or just have no comments.
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've worked on anti abuse systems and people always say just ban spammers. Just is doing a lot of heavy lifting. People feel the low percentage of spam that gets through is already too much. And when the classification messed up on the low percentage of real users that's also a terrible experience.
The precision and recall tradeoffs are difficult and all scenarios lead to people being unhappy. Not to mention the politics of big corporations where anti abuse systems usually stand in opposition to company goals which makes getting any change through difficult.
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. :-/
This is one thing that distinguishes Bluesky from other sites: they don't penalize you for linking outside the platform
Yet. They’ll have to claw back the PE cash at some point.
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.
XMPP was supposed to be the protocol that liberated chat...and yet here we are.
Sure, just self-host the entire thing away from Bluesky for only ~$150/month; it'll only take a few terabytes of space to do so [0]. The best part is the link at the top of that thread is broken, indicating that even the people that really care, still don't care enough to keep up with costs and maintenance.
I'm asking about every part of the full Bluesky stack because in the scenario that "Bluesky starts monetizing users" means if you self-host just part of the stack, and continue to rely on any portion of Bluesky's stack for your server... well, it's pretty obvious where the pressure and forced monetization will go to.
The above is why I'm intentionally ignoring all other threads about hosting just one portion of Bluesky. It being easy to self-host, say, a Personal Data Server, means that won't be the portion Bluesky builds monetization in to. The part of the stack that an extremely small number of people are willing and able (technically and financially) to host long-term, and are seen as good stewards worthy of users' trust, will be the part that starts abusing users.
Is there a cheaper method of self-hosting the entire stack I should look at, or is this seriously being pitched as something average home-labbers can do?
EDIT: Oh cool, it gets better. This [1] guide from ~2024 suggests an OVH server, also ringing in (at the time) at ~$150/month. Looking at the suggested configuration now, it's $367.98CAD / month. But please, tell me more about how if Bluesky needs to show an ROI, everyone'll start self-hosting PDS' and Relays
[0] https://lobste.rs/s/gsj2e2/how_self_host_all_bluesky_except_...
[1] https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/entries/Notes%20on%20Running...
That's one way in which ActivityPub wins over ATProto.
It's about as easy and cheap to self-host Mastodon, Pleroma, Misskey, etc... as it is most blog or forum software. It's only resource-intensive if you follow accounts or aggregators that post a ton of media, and even then unlikely to need more than single-digit terabytes of storage.
I wonder if people will ever go back to Diaspora and host their own pods. For about $40/month you can host up to about 1,500 users. I did it for a little while on a basic package for like $15/month and the directions to install are fairly straight forward and the community is really helpful.
The issue I ran into wasn't cost of hosting, it was getting people to move off whatever platform they were already on - regardless of how much better it was for controlling their own data and privacy.
These platforms are doing something wildly more exotic than I imagined. 1500 clients?! You could have hosted larger crowds in IRC with 90s hardware.
Need there be a further explanation than the vastly higher amounts (and size of) images and video that users are constantly posting?
He never suggested self-hosting, just moving to another provider.
Great! And this provider will just... eat the server, bandwidth, and storage costs, indefinitely, with no expectation of financial renumeration? Or will they charge a minimal fee that few social media users will be willing to pay?
My point stands: Hosting a full Bluesky stack is big money, every month. And that ignores how the admin must be seen in a positive light; having deep pockets isn't enough, the admin team running (and paying for) the servers must be trusted not to manipulate what gets seen, who gets banned, and what links are deemed malicious.
$150/month is a lot of money, but split just 100 ways, that's $1.50/month. If the user base is too expensive, emotionally, to do free server administration for, well, why would you want to do that job then at all? Which speaks volumes.
It's the payment onboarding that's usually the sticking point (which is fortunate for my side of the discussion, because you've missed a zero), but that also misses that hosting costs will almost certainly scale with user-count.
And I'm not discussing emotionally-heavy, but public standing within the community you've convinced to trust you with their social media algorithm
The figure is from the [0] of the comment upthread that pointed to https://lobste.rs/s/gsj2e2/how_self_host_all_bluesky_except_...
In your view, contrary to the lobster.rs post, running the server should instead cost $1,500/month and goes up exponentially to support a handful of users. Have I got you right?
How is having a good public standing to a very vocal minority about modern day sensitive topics not a high emotional cost to bear?
And that provider will be squeezed by the PE firms and/or will also attempt to squeeze users for its own benefit.
I wonder how many more cycles will it take before people stop believing that “this new platform will be different than the other ones”?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50169367
Belief isn't necessary when you have facts.
Yet.
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.
> Facebook and Google summarize everyone's content and keep all the engagement and profit for themselves.
Yes!! You’re getting it! This is what they’re optimizing for. Have been for a decade plus.
On the other hand, if we assume that Facebook and Google need to make some money, and people aren't willing to pay to use them, and people don't want ads to overshadow the algorithm, and people don't want to pay with their data, and...
What's the actual solution? What would an ethically run Google look like? I'm not even going to ask for Facebook, because I'm not convinced it's possible.
Google and Facebook make plenty of money off just ads. But that's not enough anymore, the line has to keep going up, forever.
I think some part of this is anti-bot. They don't have a good solution to this yet, I and someone else I know got a lifetime ban from Meta just from opening an account.
No actions / no posts. I guess they determined the way we opened the account was too bot like. Sucks because we're real people that were trying to buy Meta ads.
But maybe doing something like this allows them to ease those restrictions, and then by charging for posts they have an ability to determine bots from non-bots in a more robust way. I'm doubtful it will actually work - because bots are exactly the type of thing that can and will try to open dozens of accounts to get around the 2 posts per month limit.
People put the link in the comments because Facebook won't let you link to news sites in posts because they can't be posted in certain countries. So, putting the link in the comments was a workaround for that issue.
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.
If it works for Polygon wouldn't they just pay the subscription?
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".
Then downrank them.
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 work in wildland firefighting.
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.
Is it possible that these are real people who are unwell? I can imagine a situation where users who spend a lot of time (like, to an obsessive degree) viewing and commenting on regional content start getting recommendations for more similar posts, regardless of whether it's local to them not. If there's enough users like this - and I'm sure there are - Facebook might even start treating them as a demographic, effectively creating a sort of self-organizing trolling group.
I'm sure some are like you describe.
But what I keep seeing is stuff like this:
An account which seems like it was a normal account for like 10 years. Maybe it leans a bit in the direction of the content it is currently posting. But, it was mostly dormant for a few years. Then, it started posting a high volume of partisan content. It otherwise seems to be a real person, just it one day started posting hardcore partisan materials all over the regional groups (usually multiple). It's fishy.
Another one: An account which superficially seems to be a real account, except that it's got a generic enough name you can't pin down which person with that name it might be. Nothing about their profile identifies them as anyone in particular. They may have a lot of friends, but they don't appear to be people who know them IRL - just randos. Their profile feed is a mix of normal stuff and partisan stuff. What they post to groups is 100% hardcore partisan stuff. Their profile is very light on photos of themself, and always kind of low quality. There's never a photo of a place you can pin down to a real location. These don't tend to be accounts that have been around more than a year or three. Again, it's fishy.
Like I mentioned, in both cases, you'll see the accounts posting at odd hours for where they supposedly live.
They could be real people, or sophisticated trolling operations. TBH, the reason I lean more towards the latter is because Facebook is so goddamned lax about any kind of enforcement. Do I think someone could set up a bunch of fake profiles and operate them for years, all from the same Chinese or Russian IP address with locations all in the US, and Facebook would never ban them despite the accounts getting flagged? Yes, that is extremely easy to believe. If it drives engagement (and troll accounts do!), it's likely to be allowed to continue.
I'd be the happiest man on the internet for a split second if someone who works for Meta tromps on in here with a burner account and tells me I'm being an idiot, that they're fighting hard against troll armies and bots, that it's just a super hard problem because the troll/bot networks are so sophisticated. Hasn't happened yet.
Most all recommendation algorithms definitely do not care about locality of reference.
If I watch some local-to-me news stories about libraries, the algorithm decides that I like news about libraries, and begins to suggest library-related videos from all over the USA. It does not care that I only cared about libraries in Phoenix and San Diego.
Likewise, there is this one English teacher who is absolutely gorgeous and I only watch her videos to see her talk. But of course, YouTube got the idea that I like English instructional videos from anyone, anywhere, and the algorithm slowly fills my feed with videos from instructors who are not the lady I like. It's crazy, I tell ya.
I'm not on FB anymore. But when I was, I got interested in Irish topics, and it was often family research-related, and so I'd be studying some esoteric topic in a very small town in a specific county of Ireland, and of course, the recommendation engine would blossom with completely irrelevant Pages and Groups from every corner of the Republic, for no reason except to bait me into engagement.
And that's all it is, engagement bait. They on the other side of the algorithm, they know for sure that you don't actually care about those topics or locations. But they are simply trying to dangle stuff in front of you like a largemouth bass, and eventually something will enrage you or you'll need to correct someone's spelling, or make an angry face emoji on a post, and then they have your engagement, and that's all they really wanted from you.
Not to inform you, or entertain you, but to engage your shit until you absolutely lose your temper. That's what they want on social media.
There's your mistake. You need to be watching Spanish teachers.
This may not be the best place for this, but I run forth.news -- we publish primary sources, like releases/alerts from governments. (IPAWS -- the emergency alert system -- for example, is here: https://www.forth.news/lists/ipaws)
If there are PIOs/PAOs here who are looking for a new place to share alerts (for free), I'd love to chat. Our audience is growing quickly, and we can be a replacement for Facebook/Twitter/any other site making it more difficult for constituents to read alerts.
jared (at) forth (dot) news
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
Nextdoor is a platform meant to connect communities and services.
It's as bad as Facebook - and even sadder in that you know the folks are truly local, and still just as awful.
Are our only options truly old-school, disconnected approaches versus wading through trolls in a hyper-connected world?
Surely there's something else, and maybe it has nothing to do with tech as we know it.
It’s slowing changing though
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
Some previous discussion on Partiful and its Palantir ties:
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.
It's kinda crazy that Partiful existed for over 7 years, has series A funding, and yet is completely free.
It's not crazy at all if its monetization plan is to get bought for all the data it has.
Is it? Its a glorified ECard service. The entire thing could run on a single machine.
From a business perspective, it's a long time to get to your first dollar.
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.
Sharecropping is bad for sharecroppers, what a surprise.
Where did the town engage online before FB groups?
Towns would just have their own News/Events sections. I don't think FB is the right place for it.
> 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.
It was extraordinarily telling when Nazi musk showed country flags to IP on shitter. The amount of astroturfing happening to local discussions is terrible. And who is doing this? Countries where 1$ is a day's or 2 days propaganda wages.
And my community is one of those "only facebook" government messaging areas. And what do they get? 1/2 are real locals, the other half who knows. But what I do know, is that they smell like AI created profiles, and primed for propaganda.
I recently signed up to NextDoor, since I'm not even on FB anymore.
Not that NextDoor is any less toxic or useful, but your hyperlocal government agencies may be signed up there, as well. NextDoor has a dedicated "Public Agencies" tab/feed where you can ignore all the hoi polloi, if you so wish.
Many "real accounts" on NextDoor actually disclose their home neighborhood, although I have no idea if/how they filter out the liars and impostors and bots.
>Towns can't delete comments.
Ehhh, good? Should you be able to remove my comment here just because it's a child of yours?
On official announcements from a municipal government? Yes. Imagine a scenario like...
Foo Town: boil water advisory for Tuesday. The water department has noted a risk of harmful pathogens in tap water and recommends boiling water for 2 minutes before consumption all day Tuesday.
Commenter: It's all those [racial slur]s shitting in the reservoir. If that [expletive] police chief doesn't run them out of town, we're going to have to round them up and shoot them!
Assume the commenter has done this enough times to figure out what the platform's moderation will catch and what it won't. The town would probably like to be able to do some additional moderation.
That goes against Facebook policies and the account would get banned. Not to mention that’s a gigantic strawman.
> That goes against Facebook policies
Yes.
> and the account would get banned.
Might get banned? Sure. Would get banned? No. You can’t say that with certainty. From my own experience reporting comments exactly like that the automated report is almost always closed the first time. If I appeal to a human reviewer (if they still have those?) it’s a 30/70 chance, 70 being the chance the report is closed again since “this doesn’t violate our…”
> Not to mention that’s a gigantic strawman.
A strawman of what? Are you claiming this doesn’t happen or do you just have qualms with the frequency claimed that it happens? I encounter deplorable comments like that daily. Granted I’m one data point but you haven’t presented your data points that lead you to conclude GP’s comment is a gigantic strawman.
It’s a strawman because you went for the absolute worst comment. If towns had the power to remove comments from their pages, 99.9% of the time it would be used to remove comments that criticise the local government. I’d rather read the occasional deranged tirade thank you.
> That goes against Facebook policies and the account would get banned.
lol. the "lol" isn't directed at you. I'm not laughing at you. But FB is infamous for "we will ban you due to some stupid innocuous or mostly innocuous thing but you can report the worst things imaginable and that 'doesn't violate community standards'
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…
Is surfacing the site easy?
It explicitly is not, but the point I made was that doing it via FB is slowly becoming less easy as well.
The only challenge now is that those small websites can practically be DDOS'ed by AI crawlers. If not for denial of service, then to rack up hosting bill.
Why is there no GUI desktop app that lets you easily make a website?
Yeah let's bring back Dreamweaver.
Because there are a million web-based ones?
Microsoft Frontpage /s
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.
I'm 48 years old, and I know Facebook is still strong in developing countries. There are also some provinces outside the capital cities where everything still revolves around Facebook. But every time I've checked since 2019, everything has seemed pretty much dead. And I'm not even counting Europe, where it's completely dead.
I have to use it because for some reason lots of people still are active in groups which are good leads for my business and it sucks
Instagram is the New Facebook for the youngs
Instagram is a garbage platform now, too. I used it back when it was just a feed of the people I follow. Every few months I'll click an Instagram link sent to me by someone else, and then I'll check my feed out of morbid curiosity, and it's 70% promoted/recommended posts from people I don't know.
Glad I don't spend time there anymore either.
Shh! Don't tell anyone.
The feed is dead but everything else is very much alive. Pages, events, and marketplace are still used by most people.
Its a ghostown, nothing more that our digital footpritn from we were young and wild.
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.
"Dead" is a relative measure. When I used it heavily (roughly 2004-2015 or so), most of my friends were active on there, and would post things (interesting or otherwise) multiple times per day or at least near-daily.
Nowadays I sign into my FB account every 3-6 months or so to find something specific about someone, and I see that my feed is dominated by 4-5 people (out of around 1,000 "friends"). If I'm curious and start searching for other friends specifically, nearly all of of them have not posted in years.
Sure, there are some active community-type spaces there, but that is a very small part of what FB used to be.
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.
Between marketplace and community groups facebook is very much used in my city
I don't use marketplace but if anyone buys/sells used stuff then they are likely on marketplace.
Its ubiquitous for reselling.
I don't know what you are talking about, in my locale and community (coastal SoCal) it is practically essential for keeping on tops of events and learning about potential gigs. Making a facebook post is about the most reliable method I have for broadcasting a message to my friends. Most everybody is still on it. I am an elder millenial.
Yeah, a couple of months after I graduated in 2015, it was dead, 5 years after that, same as profile images everywhere, nothing changed, immediately abandoned after the forced school interactions lmao
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”)
"War on hyperlinks"?
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.
Is this what's behind the "link to the article in comments" that all news outlets do on FB?
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.
For a long time. Essentially all social media will heavily downrank any post that includes a link. They don't want you leaving.
Every platform hates links. Xitter started trying to make links look like pictures, for example.
https://dev.to/ascorbic/bring-back-the-twitter-link-preview-...
X deprioritizes content that includes links outside of X.
As well as LinkedIn. "Put your link in the first comment and pin it" was the workaround...
They removed that a while ago.
Do you have data? Because I don't know how to see their algorithm ranking objectively enough to verify.
https://github.com/xai-org/x-algorithm
The algorithm is open source and does not include logic for down ranking external links.
In Instagram you can't really even put links at all. It's on purpose to keep you scrolling inside the walled garden.
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.
To be fair, Twitter was always making terrible product decisions. They were just doing it with 3x the staff and spending back then.
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.
One could argue the two (Musk's politics and Twitter's actions) are related
X's algorithm no longer downranks for using links.
Extraordinary claims should come with extraordinary evidence. Also, as a layman outside their system, how can you verify this?
The owner of the site said so https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2082273378749268440 and it is backed by the open source algorithm they released.
https://github.com/xai-org/x-algorithm
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.
I have some respect for Meta Research for the good they did releasing Torch, FastText vectors, and the LLaMa models among others for free.
How does this work fits with their mission of destroying the fabric of society and the mental well-being of teenagers, I cannot explain.
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.
To me it read as, "Scantrons did a lot of good, but were developed to track Jewish concentration camp prisoners" type a thing.
Meta's ultimate goal is immoral. It's not justified if a few projects do some good.
Unless the scantron corporation is so antisemitic they invented a time machine to participate in world war 2, I think you mean IBM.
> 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.
This is the funniest thing I’ve read on here.
A modest proposal, really.
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.
You've got to justify such a silly comparison.
Agreed, it takes a lot more power and doesn't run nearly as cool as all that.
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.
ZSTD as well.
wasn't LLaMa only open source because it had already leaked anyways? And they wanted to spin it in a positive light for their stakeholders.
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.
I never said they were open source. Everything else you wrote is factually incorrect.
When you run a proprietary program (like Adobe Photoshop or a closed-source game) on your PC, you get a compiled binary of machine code. The high-level logic is stripped out, variables are obfuscated, and the EULA legally forbids you from decompiling, reverse-engineering, or modifying the binary.
With an open model, you get the actual Python/C++/CUDA code defining the exact mathematical structure of the model. And you get a weights file, which is an unencrypted, open array of floating-point numbers representing every synaptic strength in the network.
So you can inspect the exact mathematical state of the model at any arbitrary moment during inference -- in other words, you can study open models. You can fine-tune or quantize them -- in other words, you can improve them quite significantly! And much much more.
> it was very brave, and very influential. In my eyes, it outweighs everything negative they've ever done.
Are you being sarcastic? Please let it be that you’re being sarcastic.
I am serious. I believe that the LLM is the defining technology of our time -- at least as important and as impactful as the internet itself -- and that Meta's opening of LLaMa has profoundly changed the landscape for the better.
> I have some respect ... I cannot explain.
Naturally, they do it to earn "some respect" from those who otherwise see them clearly.
> 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.
> 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).
Contributed anything to society. I doubt anyone in my local community is going to know or care what any of those libraries, frameworks, etc are.
Your local community also probably doesn't know or care a lot about water purification, power distribution, standardized shipping, or the myriad other technologies that make society work.
Zstd is worth a lot of other's people's pain.
My subtle point is that there are a lot of real reasons to dislike Meta. No reason to have hate blind you..
> Zstd is worth a lot of other's people's pain.
"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...
What is your point? That zstd cannot exist? That it shouldn't? I can't read minds you know.
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.
> What is your point? That zstd cannot exist? That it shouldn't? I can't read minds you know.
Would it be better that:
* zstd exists because Meta exists (net benefiting over other people's pain — including possibly the 'pain' of genocide), or
* a genocide did not happen (or was not as bad) because Meta did not exist (but we never got zstd)?
Friend, there is no better. There is just this. I know it is hard for you to hear me, but hear me for I do have something to tell you.
We do not live in a perfect world. That is a simple fact, but I need you to accept that fact before we have a chance to communicate. I don't mean me reading, you responding ad infinitum. No. I mean communicating.
Can you do that for me? Because if you are gonna give me tired binary choices along the lines of:
1) would you rather have a cookie 2) would you rather go to work
It is not much of a choice. It is a cute rhetoric, but it is not the reality in which we live.
Fucking qed.
> Friend, there is no better. There is just this. I know it is hard for you to hear me, but hear me for I do have something to tell you.
This sub-thread started with:
> Zstd is worth a lot of other's people's pain.
The (philosophical/theoretical) debate/discussion is about the 'quantity' of "people's pain", and how much of it is it worth for having Zstd (and other things that have come out of Meta/FB). What is the 'trade-off' (if any) between getting good and accepting evil? (Assuming "good" and "evil" even exist.)
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ones_Who_Walk_Away_from_Om...
First, it started with grandparent stating:
"none of those contributions are worth the pain that they have caused."
Which a little excessive and I take personal issue with never, all, and none when someone writes that -- out of principle.
Second, are we talking about its quantity or quality, because I posit that big numbers aint everything.
I prefer a world where we have to live with zlib, lz4, and xz but have less genocide. I get that I didn't get a vote in which world we have, but I do have an opinion. And you do, too.
Thanks for mentioning that. It reinforces my desire to avoid zstd because of its connection to Facebook.
One would hope, on technical grounds.
I was editing when your reply came out. Nope. Luckily it's a family of technologies.
Hey. If it makes you happy, who am I to judge.
"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!!!!"
And? I stand by my what is your point?
edit:
I am not even baiting you man. I am just not sure why you have a beein your bonnet.
If it took you pulling the trigger, how many people would you murder to make a slightly better compression algorithm?
If you outsourced the murder to someone else, how many people would you be OK with murdering?
Wouldn't it be better if we didn't continue to support corporations who enable genocide around the world?
Now, ultimately I'll still end up using zstd. I'm not happy about it's ties to Facebook. But it's code that exists out there now, I don't see the reason to not use it. But I'll still try and avoid giving Facebook any money or praise. I don't give praise to Facebook engineers, at least not ones recently working there. They're massively paid in blood money, and they should already understand that by now. Their products hurt societies around the world, and they don't actually change.
Here we go.
You're wearing shoes, aren't you? Own a smartphone? Drive a hybrid? Use a computer? Ever eaten a banana? Bought something from Amazon? Turned on the air conditioning? Somewhere down those supply chains, someone suffered for your convenience. Every purchase is an atrocity by proxy. Every breath is stolen oxygen. Every step displaces an innocent insect. Your very existence is an ongoing ecological war crime. And you have the audacity to sit there, wearing pants assembled by strangers, pretending your hands are clean?
Repent, sinner. Atone.
> You're wearing shoes, aren't you?
Not currently, no. But when I do, I do bother actually trying to check sources. The last things on my feet were sandals purchased from the people who actually made them.
> Every purchase is an atrocity by proxy.
I mean, I understand tHeRe Is nO eThIcAl CoNsUmPtIoN uNdEr CaPitAlIsM. Sure. But when you know a specific supplier is a bad actor, has been pointed out as a bad actor, and refuses to change, do you continue to support that bad actor when you have tons of options? Do you continue choosing to champion them on forums online, despite knowing their entire product line is "we're going to throw kids into an emotionally damaging blender, sow discontent in your community, help ruin mental health globally, support genocidal maniacs overseas, spread massive disinformation, and overall damage everything you care about!"
Do you just pour your used motor oil down the storm drains because, hey, the environment is fucked anyways, or do you at least try to reduce your impact?
And once again, I even mentioned I'll continue to use zstd. I totally get that by using zstd I'm not directly supporting these things. But acting like "hey Facebook is great and its perfectly fine tons of people died directly to finance zstd's development" is IMO a bad take on the whole situation.
So once again I ask, if it took you pulling the trigger, how many people would you personally murder to have zstd be financed, since you seem perfectly OK with trading human lives for compression algorithms? Or would you argue we shouldn't be trading lives for compression algorithms in the first place, and we should press on those corporations who do make money off such things to stop doing so instead of arguing we should just accept it?
<< I even mentioned I'll continue to use zstd. I totally get that by using zstd I'm not directly supporting these things. But acting like "hey Facebook is great and its perfectly fine tons of people died directly to finance zstd's development" is IMO a bad take on the whole situation.
Apologies, it is possible that I mistook you for another zealot. I obviously don't really disagree, but I find the holier than thou stance difficult to approach neutrally.
<< if it took you pulling the trigger, how many people would you personally murder to have zstd be financed,
None. Here the hypothetical is simple.
> None. Here the hypothetical is simple.
This doesn't square with your "Zstd is worth a lot of other's people's pain" earlier statement. So what is it, you just don't care to actually be the one to inflict such pain? You're entirely OK with the idea that by championing zstd and telling people "its worth a lot of other's people's pain", knowing that by other's people's pain we're talking genocide, suicide, and deaths due to misinformation, so long as its not you specifically having to do that? Why is that?
You've already stated its definitely worth it. Just not worth it for you to pull the trigger, but worth it enough for you to champion somebody else to pull the trigger?
Personally I'd never say a compression algorithm is worth a genocide.
And we were doing so well.
<< I even mentioned I'll continue to use zstd. I totally get that by using zstd I'm not directly supporting these things. But acting like "hey Facebook is great and its perfectly fine tons of people died directly to finance zstd's development" is IMO a bad take on the whole situation.
Then, based on your line of argumentation, you are simply a hypocrite; very pedestrian ( I am personally disappointed ). You are perfectly ok with using zstd knowing that it indirectly supports company and the evil deeds it bestows upon the world while knowing it to be true AND lecturing others about the evil deeds they do.
<< You've already stated its definitely worth it. Just not worth it for you to pull the trigger, but worth it enough for you to champion somebody else to pull the trigger?
Again, are you using a computer terminal to type those letters in? Are those letters worth the lives that made it possible for you to have this philosophical treatise on why you feel morally superior to me?
Yes? Then maybe you shouldn't, because you explicitly are not.
You are just like all the other kids out there unable to actually stand by what you claim to believe.
Me? I just live it.
<< Personally I'd never say a compression algorithm is worth a genocide.
You know.. I have rather fascinating realization. Maybe it is true that you would never say it. That is simply not done. You would just let it happen should the compression compressed enough. How do I know? You already stated you will continue to use it.
Heh.
Sorry man. I expected better.
> knowing that it indirectly supports company
> I totally get that by using zstd I'm not directly supporting these things.
I'm not supporting Facebook by using a library that's freely available on the public internet and hosted by others. I'm not out there saying its worth the genocide. I actively try and avoid giving Facebook any amount of actual value from me and the things I touch. If you can point to how me using a package pulled from some debian package host is actively supporting Facebook, I'll try and reduce my consumption of the library.
> You are just like all the other kids out there
Ah, an ad hominem. I didn't expect better.
> you are simply a hypocrite
I am no perfect person and agree at times I am a hypocrite. I acknowledge the basics of the concept tHeRe iS nO sUcH tHiNg As eThIcAl cOnSuMpTuIoN uNdEr cApItAlIsm, and ultimately almost every product I buy can probably trace some amount of its lineage to the suffering of others. I do think to a certain extent some of that amount of suffering is inherently impossible to avoid in the world of globalized supply chains, and ultimately I will end up consuming something connected to it. But if there's a choice of company A that causes X amount of societal damage and company B that causes 2X amount of societal damage, and you can freely choose between them, which do you choose? Do you go online and directly argue company B's products are definitely worth the extra human suffering?
> How do I know? You already stated you will continue to use it.
I use it because its there, open source, and freely available. Because, sure, you're right, it exists regardless of the suffering at this point. If they charged even a penny for a lifetime license I wouldn't use it, because I don't want to support Meta or companies like them if I have the choice. Same goes for lots of other corporations which I feel are directly bad actors, have been called out for being a bad actor, and I can actually choose a different supplier or eliminate such a thing from my life.
Using an open-source library already in the public space isn't the same as supporting a corporation. Going on a forum and saying their products are worth genocide and excusing their bad actions is supporting that corporation. Do you not see the difference? Is installing MariaDB supporting Oracle, as some amount of the code traces a lineage to codebases now owned by Oracle?
> Me? I just live it.
You're not "just living it" though. You're actively saying a compression library is worth a genocide, so long as you don't have to pull the trigger. If they came to you and said "we'll make you a better compression algorithm, but we'll support a genocide on the other side of world to finance its development", would you choose to take that trade? Is such a thing is OK with you, that it doesn't really matter to try and push suppliers to be better, because its worth it? If not, please do correct me, but that's definitely what I'm understanding from our conversation.
Ultimately if they came to me with that choice, I'd say no. Please stop supporting genocide and social unrest around the world would be my response. I'll continue with whatever compression library I already have, or maybe go try and get someone else to make a better one. I wouldn't just think "hey its worth it to trade human lives for financing software development".
He doesn't just LOOK sociopathic...
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.
> and don't solve actual problems
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’m not a fan of React at all, but React Native got me out of a jam when I had to build identical apps for AppleTV and Android/Amazon TV.
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.
Some of that tech was developed over ten years ago
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 would trade React for a world without Facebook any day of the week.
Tastes better, more filling
I don't get why people say Oppenheimer was a talented scientist when I don't want nuclear weapons to exist
Some of them might be trying to justify the things they do at their day jobs that make the world worse.
I can acknowledge that someone is intelligent, skilled, or talented without respecting them or their decision to apply their intelligence, skills, or talent to an ignoble cause.
How have any of those made the world inhabited by humans in any way better?
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.
The Nazis pushed for anti smoking policies.
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.
I mean, Hack? Who cares?
You use more than half of those on a daily basis just by using any piece of modern electronics or connecting to the internet.
I also "use" Facebook tracking and ads and I'm not psyched about that either!
You also use your phone that requires cobalt mined by child labor, wear clothes made by slave labor in countries like Vietnam and Bangladesh etc, so what's your point? The world is not black and white.
Original comment you responded to said "> [Meta] have arguably contributed nothing to society for over a decade" and you responded with a list of tech that is supposed to indicate their contribution. I'm not impressed. I'm also not impressed by fast fashion and child labor phones. Big Tech has been a scourge and 20% less web traffic because of zstd does not absolve them.
Is your sole measure of value whether you personally use a thing?
Yes, you've never used a React website in your life or downloaded something with zstd despite them being defaults on the internet.
> for very fat salaries
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.
Getting paid half a million TC at Meta beats only making 150k as a DoD contractor.
You’re arguably a war criminal either way, might as well get top dollar.
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.
I just turned down a DoD contractor interview. It’s one of my red lines tbh.
I’ll still take a half million dollar Meta job though.
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 mean, squarespace and similar services exist. Sure, there's a fee associated, but compared to even the costs of running a small coffee bar it's negligible. I could understand this argument in the 2000s and early 2010s; setting up a website meant engaging with a web consultant or similar IT agency, and there were yearly maintenance costs. It wasn't out of reach for most businesses, but it was expensive enough that a Facebook page was a genuine cost savings.
Anymore, putting up a basic template page for your business is maybe 2-3 hours if you're really non-technical. Sure, it will be just the basic template, but there's very little need for more customization than that. That hypothetical coffee bar really just needs a place to post hours, their menu, and maybe update with specials if they're ambitious. That's about all you get with a Facebook page anyway, there's zero customization.
Thank God the teens have healthier outlets now like TikTok!
TikTok was actually pretty good before Larry the Lawnmower bought it.
Citation needed. TikTok has always been brainrot.
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.
Yeah, that's a fair response. And most of what I don't like about Facebook can be summarized as, "they tried to turn it into TikTok."
> 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.
> 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)
> revolutionized the web
Personally I hate what react has done to the web.
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.
Did the makers of anuglarjs also have a conflict of interest? Or did they ruin the web just for the love of the game?
Angular would've done the same thing but more poorly
React was over a decade ago.
Did you ever have one of those days when React doesn't, variables don't, and constants aren't?
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
React did not revolutionize the web. The fuck are you talking about?
React is kinda shit.
> and maybe even made it worse
I don’t think that’s a maybe. There’s actual research on social media addiction. For me, getting off Facebook improved my life.
The salaries aren't based on contribution to society, they are based on contribution to Meta. Fat salaries come from fat contributions.
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.
To Meta workers -- and I've known many of you, right up to the c-suite.
If you still work there, you're a garbage human being. It's that simple. You are a POS that deserves no harbor or shelter from any right-thinking tech worker.
(All here have noticed how you no longer highlight your workplace. Apparently shame is useful for something, if not enough.)
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.
First of all, i don’t know why you are talking about engineers. This is a business decision, not an engineering one.
> 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.
> 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.
I saw the best minds of my generation consumed by Adtech, starving hysterical naked
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.
At least Google lets me install Projectivy Launcher on the device I paid for so I never have to see a single ad on my TV. And use ADB to customize those branded OEM remote buttons for HBO/Netflix/etc to do what I want instead.
Plus sideload apps like Smarttube to watch ad-free YouTube that would never be allowed on Play Store/App Store for either Android/iOS.
User hostile stuff out of the box is much less aggravating to me if I'm also provided the means to bypass it. Even if it's mildly inconvenient to setup, it's still vastly better than the alternative.
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.
Yeah, I don't know if they're incredibly good engineers. We know they may have gone to Ivy League schools and for sure are excellent at algorithms during job interviews.
I applied there a long time ago and they seemed more interested in my math background and schooling and coding than my work experience.
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.
There's nothing better about working at Meta than working at Flock or X or Kalshi or Palantir, it's pretty clear that Meta has done far more damage than all 3 combined due to scale. The problem is that many more people on HN have worked at Meta or know someone who has, so coming to terms with that would be painful, so they rather not. It's not too different for people outside tech who pretend to care about these things, but instead of knowing people who work there they're active users of Meta platforms. And I guess the open source contributions give a convenience excuse to techies, as if they make up for even 0.1% of the damage.
This is also why criticism of Meta tends to get a much worse vote ratio in comments on HN than for the other companies I named, lots of people here with direct personal connections to them due to scale.
Meta just added another chapter to their endless list, election interference in Brazil to help Bolsonaro. Just like X.
> 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.
PyTorch .. React ..
That two libraries already build Frontend and AI.
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.
And yes, I mean facebook.com
thank you for saying this. We have to bring back shaming in tech.
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've heard that millions of girls wanting to get rich look up to those "OF models" as role models.
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.
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.
I dont think OF models are some paragon of virtue but theyre leagues ahead of engineers who choose to work at Meta
I agree, what I'm arguing is that money != respect as the parent asserted.
The sooner we get past scarcity-only economics the better. It probably made a lot of sense at one time but now it's killing us.
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.
If Facebook stopped working today, would anything happen? Besides people having a lot of new free time on on their hands?
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?
Presumably this is an A/B test? I don't see how that's remotely sustainable
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.
History tells us that a large portion of the population can be out of touch. Sometimes almost everybody in a given society.
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 just wish they'd stop buying promising stuff like Rivos that they're almost certain to ruin on their way down.
One can hope.
Agreed, they are eating the seed corn with this one
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
It wasn't that Sears was unable to adapt to new realities, they merely had a incompetent hedge fund manager CEO who was unable to separate his fantasy world of Objectivist delusions from reality. He tried to implement a management structure based on Ayn Rand novels, with predictable results. Sears didn't die a natural death, it was the victim of yet another Objectivist murder.
https://www.inc.com/erik-sherman/sears-ceo-eddie-lampert-sho...
https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/4385-failing-to-plan-h...
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.
Not just Pages, but I've read this is also coming to any user who at some point in the past clicked the prompt to turn their account into a "pro" one. I did it long ago, just to see what info it would give me; then found little of interest, and forgot about it. Since then people have followed me who didn't friend me. Now, I can revert to a non-pro account (gaining ability to post more than 2 links) but I'd lose all the non-friend followers. Whatever. It's amazing how much junk FB is now. My feed is mostly crap from people/pages I don't follow and have no interest in.
Pricing:
Source: https://www.facebook.com/help/1929252614431792So is this a kite for one way to commercialize all of Meta's platforms? Or perhaps just a way to kill off a dead business under the guise of a failed experiment?
archived facebook help page, no trackers: https://nonograph.com/about-links-in-organic-facebook-page-p...
source: https://www.facebook.com/help/1929252614431792
I love that they specified that links in ads do not count
I created a new public group and posted three links from my blog to it in the space of 2 minutes without being charged https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtUvHF02lx4
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.
> posted three links from my blog to it
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 want Yellow Pages, not Facebook Pages. And ditch any other form of ad.
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.
Don’t forget the other big fraud vector:
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.”
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 chosen thresholds are a bit absurd
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.
And my point is that they don't want to punish scammers, they want to get money from businesses. In that view, the limit is not absurd, it's pretty carefully calibrated to make sure that every business with an active Facebook Page needs to pay (but not before they get set up).
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
Guess it's a tactic to go after bots and scammers?
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.)
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.
I really hope this makes business websites great again. And using Google Maps to publish business updates. The number of times I've gone to a business during their open hours only to learn that they're closed and that the update was published to Facebook or Instagram is absurd.
This can't be sustainable.
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.
Since links within Meta are free, maybe they are hoping you will bring all the external resources into some Meta property?
Probably. Their aim has always been to colonize the entire web.
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.
Perhaps share QR codes with links. :)
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.
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.
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...
No municipal or public entity should use Facebook as a means of distributing information.
Why not go with Youtube route of force-feeding/shoving ADs in our face for having to share more links?
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.
Do they even know what H stands for in HTML?
>Don't know why we bother with them.
It's very much a bandwagon mentality. "We" is you.
Almost certainly a way to mitigate bots and spam. Not surprised in the slightest.
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.
Have any of them seriously considered going back to print-only?
> Surveillance capitalists have built a truly miserable internet.
The way I saw it put recently: the internet used to be a library and now it's a store.
I’d be very satisfied with a store. It’s more like a bazaar where half the patrons are pickpockets and half the stalls are selling counterfeit stuff that will harm you. And there are no police to protect you from any of that (though you do get temporarily ejected if you say words that aren’t allowed, like “kill” or “rape” - in any context including honest reporting).
I joked to wife about paying for Facebook in 2011.
Monopolies suck.
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.
Extortionist mafia is getting more extorionist...
EU should just blok meta(fb/inst)/x|twatter/tiktok and rest of usanian BigTech at this point…
What if i just post a QR code?
Probably an unpopular take, but this is not a bad thing. Maybe weird on it being for link sharing, but it’s always been deeply anticompetitive to offer a free webpage. It’s bad for the market for them to set the price of hosting a webpage for a business at zero, and the network effects make it easier for them to lock businesses in
That's not what this is though.
If your facebook page were your hosted website, everything's fine and dandy. Cost is still zero!
This move punishes people who do have their own website that they are paying for, and also have a facebook page that links to the main site.
Right, but my opinion is that they should charge everyone. This is at least a step in that direction. It’s not “punishing” anyone, it’s making just making it more clear that instead of money they want you to pay with engagement. Apparently 2 links a month is enough of a loss in engagement that the marginal cost of hosting their page outweighs the value Meta gains from having that business on the platform for “free”.
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.
Facebook actively courted publishers so they'd post links to their content on their pages. Now they want to charge them for the privilege.
First hit’s free.
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.
What do they rely on then?
This is for Facebook Pages, not for users. Average facebook daily user can keep posting 35 links a day to their favorite slop site.
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 wish there were a way to filter links and reshares out of my feed completely.
If it is for that reason and not a money squeezing/enshittification thing, it seems like a big admission their feed algorithm doesn't work.
It has been disincentivising links for quite some time, so more opinions and fluff, fewer quality posts and links to external materials.
So happy. All the fake news will cost much more now. Best case: less shit-links going around. Best case 2: Facebook closes down. No worst case.
What about the well funded nation state actors? They'll just buy ad's and keep blasting away.
I think they can afford to pay $50 a month.
Curious how this affects the api. Feels like a big breaking change which I’ve heard nothing about.
Those free and open models though
Title isn’t fully accurate. This is specifically for business pages. You can still post links on your own profile or groups.
They just want kill small web and keep people on their platforms.
I mean, this isn't really a surprise. On many social media platforms, you get instantly banned/shadowbanned if you post an external link, if you can publish that post in the first place at all. From the platform's perspective, there is almost no incentive to allow external links (spam, leakage etc). There is no law to mandate that third party links must be allowed.
I don't like this but also don't see how this can be different in the real world.
Simply insane. But honestly if anyone is using Facebook still that's on them. I can't fathom how people still use 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.
I’d be highly skeptical that more than 2% of the posts Mom sees are by her family or friends. Ads, posts by strangers, groups I’m in - those are 90% of what the algorithm serves on the main feed.
Of course, but there’s still no alternative platform to stay in touch with friends and family.
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.
Rug pull!!!! I love it
Genuinely, I think having a postal code based swap system run by post offices would be the ideal situation
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
and postal money orders.
Don't become dependent on these greedy corporations.
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.
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.
https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...
"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.
Said it before, but this company's product managers are pure evil.
Engineers are enablers at best. If you are not trapped there by visa issues or vesting problems you should take your money and RUN.
In think in the future, they will charge users for posting anything more than x times a months.
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.
This will kill most of Facebook.
So many pages link out to other things, including major news sites.
This will either get reverted or Facebook will die. Mark's choice.
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.
Is Facebook even relevant anymore?
This is to get sites that monetize Facebook as a funnel to pay.
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.
I keep getting this feeling that we're in late-stage capitalism because of how all the oligarchs are maximizing extraction:
* 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.
Venezuela wasn’t working (for its own people) in its previous state either, so it’s pretty hilarious to talk like America is ruining it.
Ask the average citizen there in a couple years, and if they’re not better off than they were under their dictator, I’ll eat crow.
(No real dispute on the other two examples).
I hope you're right. I do wish there was another way to get to what you are describing besides the same strong-arm tactics that the U.S. used to subjugate many other countries in Latin America: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
Isn’t this good news? I imagine a lot of misinformation and phishing will become difficult.
this will just kill genuine posting, your favorite pages will stop sharing and your feed will drown in even more AI slop
I barely use fb as it is and this will just drive me off the platform entirely
This is last stage capitalism of these tech platforms.
Nothing much left to innovate.
late 2025: Facebook tests £9.99 monthly subscription for sharing more than two links https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46314668
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.
https://www.facebook.com/help/1929252614431792/
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.
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.
World Wide Web, huh?
Those hyperlinks ain't free, you know.
Of course they’re not free for Meta, as they allow people to access other sites than Facebook.
> World Wide Web
Embrace, extend, extinguish
They need to introduce postage for messages.
So... what
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?
dogshit platform.
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.
The problem is that it’s the only thing slightly webpage-shaped that is free and extremely easy to make/edit. (Yes, I know that it I’m putting the bar extremely low because it’s an incredibly limiting platform)
You or I could put up an html site and host it on Cloudflare Workers for a total cost of 0 + the domain reg. But mom and pop don’t even know what html is and are too cheap to pay $500 (and some ongoing cost to a local “we build and host your website” firm to do it.
They could probably pay for Squarespace and just tell an AI “here’s a Word doc of my menu, build me a site for my restaurant” but Squarespace just isn’t free.
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 don’t know whether to be glad about this because of how horrifying YouTube’s spam problem is, or annoyed because it isn’t helping since their comments are what’s full of rampant fraud spam of every kind.
Honestly, the best thing YouTube could do to help protect users would be to shift to moderated comments only. If the video creator or their designated moderator doesn’t choose to explicitly show a comment, it should go in a black hole. Or even better, offer a service for a small fee relative to your channel’s revenue, which uses a Gemini flash model to approve on-topic comments. Creators can choose to invest either their time or their money, or just have no comments.
I'm not sure a phone number is particularly valuable. It is a decent way pretty much ensure that you aren't a bot, though.
Seems like an anti spam measure. Bad actors ruin all features where links can be placed in front of eyes.
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've worked on anti abuse systems and people always say just ban spammers. Just is doing a lot of heavy lifting. People feel the low percentage of spam that gets through is already too much. And when the classification messed up on the low percentage of real users that's also a terrible experience.
The precision and recall tradeoffs are difficult and all scenarios lead to people being unhappy. Not to mention the politics of big corporations where anti abuse systems usually stand in opposition to company goals which makes getting any change through difficult.
Easier to harvest content for AI. Scraping the open internet is going to get more challenging.