Facebook Pages require paid subscription to post more than two links per month (mastodon.gamedev.place)

390 pointsby AshleysBrain7 hours ago346 comments

belak 6 hours ago

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".

hattmall 6 hours ago

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.

sparky_twofort 6 hours ago

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. :-/

QuercusMax 6 hours ago

This is one thing that distinguishes Bluesky from other sites: they don't penalize you for linking outside the platform

robin_reala 6 hours ago

Yet. They’ll have to claw back the PE cash at some point.

johnecheck 5 hours ago

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.

xethos 4 hours ago

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...

adamtulinius 4 hours ago

He never suggested self-hosting, just moving to another provider.

xethos 4 hours ago

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.

solyin 3 hours ago

$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.

xethos 2 hours ago

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

solyin 7 minutes ago

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?

tourmalinetaco 4 hours ago

And that provider will be squeezed by the PE firms and/or will also attempt to squeeze users for its own benefit.

Zak 3 hours ago

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.

burningChrome 3 hours ago

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.

0cf8612b2e1e 3 hours ago

These platforms are doing something wildly more exotic than I imagined. 1500 clients?! You could have hosted larger crowds in IRC with 90s hardware.

BobaFloutist 2 hours ago

Need there be a further explanation than the vastly higher amounts (and size of) images and video that users are constantly posting?

nunez 3 hours ago

XMPP was supposed to be the protocol that liberated chat...and yet here we are.

xp84 5 hours ago

I wonder how many more cycles will it take before people stop believing that “this new platform will be different than the other ones”?

jasonlotito 4 hours ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50169367

Belief isn't necessary when you have facts.

wavemode 6 hours ago

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.

xp84 5 hours ago

> 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.

BobaFloutist 2 hours ago

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.

LargeWu 44 minutes ago

Google and Facebook make plenty of money off just ads. But that's not enough anymore, the line has to keep going up, forever.

londons_explore 5 hours ago

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.

nickabe 3 hours ago

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.

josefresco 7 hours ago

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.

iugtmkbdfil834 6 hours ago

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.

onemoresoop 5 hours ago

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…

SketchySeaBeast 5 hours ago

Is surfacing the site easy?

iugtmkbdfil834 5 hours ago

It explicitly is not, but the point I made was that doing it via FB is slowly becoming less easy as well.

avgDev 5 hours ago

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.

joenot443 5 hours ago

Where did the town engage online before FB groups?

avgDev 5 hours ago

Towns would just have their own News/Events sections. I don't think FB is the right place for it.

guyzero 5 hours ago

Sharecropping is bad for sharecroppers, what a surprise.

charliebwrites 5 hours ago

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

paimapi 5 hours ago

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.

levkk 5 hours ago

It's kinda crazy that Partiful existed for over 7 years, has series A funding, and yet is completely free.

tempest_ 2 hours ago

Is it? Its a glorified ECard service. The entire thing could run on a single machine.

levkk 24 minutes ago

From a business perspective, it's a long time to get to your first dollar.

GeorgeWBasic 19 minutes ago

It's not crazy at all if its monetization plan is to get bought for all the data it has.

spankalee 5 hours ago

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.

chneu 5 hours ago

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

RajT88 5 hours ago

> 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.

duskwuff 4 hours ago

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.

RajT88 3 hours ago

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.

ButlerianJihad 40 minutes ago

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.

RajT88 37 minutes ago

There's your mistake. You need to be watching Spanish teachers.

akudha 5 hours ago

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

jodacola 3 hours ago

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.

jaredwiener 4 hours ago

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

gvfsa 3 hours ago

>Towns can't delete comments.

Ehhh, good? Should you be able to remove my comment here just because it's a child of yours?

Zak 3 hours ago

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.

gvfsa 3 hours ago

That goes against Facebook policies and the account would get banned. Not to mention that’s a gigantic strawman.

oenton an hour ago

> 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.

gvfsa 18 minutes ago

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.

alex1138 34 minutes ago

> 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'

privacyishuman 5 hours ago

Why is there no GUI desktop app that lets you easily make a website?

jaredwiener 4 hours ago

Because there are a million web-based ones?

robotnikman 3 hours ago

Microsoft Frontpage /s

TrackerFF 3 hours ago

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.

forgetcolor 43 minutes ago

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.

meerita 6 hours ago

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.

jeanpah 6 hours ago

Its a ghostown, nothing more that our digital footpritn from we were young and wild.

Waterluvian 5 hours ago

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.

PaulHoule 5 hours ago

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.

drop_star 5 hours ago

Between marketplace and community groups facebook is very much used in my city

chneu 5 hours ago

I don't use marketplace but if anyone buys/sells used stuff then they are likely on marketplace.

Its ubiquitous for reselling.

julianlam 5 hours ago

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.

jeanpah 5 hours ago

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

xp84 5 hours ago

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.

pdntspa an hour ago

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.

wavemode 5 hours ago

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.

meerita 4 hours ago

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.

freecodeio 3 hours ago

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

nunez 3 hours ago

Instagram is the New Facebook for the youngs

RegW 8 minutes ago

Shh! Don't tell anyone.

mawadev 2 hours ago

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

driverdan 39 minutes ago

The feed is dead but everything else is very much alive. Pages, events, and marketplace are still used by most people.

tech234a 36 minutes ago

Pricing:

    Free or $14.99/mo - 2 links
    $49.99/mo - 8 links
    $149.99/mo - 20 links
    $499.99/mo - unlimited links

Source: https://www.facebook.com/help/1929252614431792

rickcarlino 6 hours ago

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”)

hungryhobbit 6 hours ago

"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.

NewJazz 6 hours ago

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-...

billyp-rva 6 hours ago

For a long time. Essentially all social media will heavily downrank any post that includes a link. They don't want you leaving.

slfnflctd 6 hours ago

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.

mixdup 6 hours ago

Is this what's behind the "link to the article in comments" that all news outlets do on FB?

pxx 6 hours ago

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

UberFly 5 hours ago

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.

xp84 5 hours ago

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.

PaulHoule 5 hours ago

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.

ekholm_e 6 hours ago

X deprioritizes content that includes links outside of X.

charcircuit 5 hours ago

They removed that a while ago.

antiframe 25 minutes ago

Do you have data? Because I don't know how to see their algorithm ranking objectively enough to verify.

SeriousM 4 hours ago

As well as LinkedIn. "Put your link in the first comment and pin it" was the workaround...

add-sub-mul-div 6 hours ago

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.

steve1977 6 hours ago

One could argue the two (Musk's politics and Twitter's actions) are related

xp84 5 hours ago

To be fair, Twitter was always making terrible product decisions. They were just doing it with 3x the staff and spending back then.

chihuahua 5 hours ago

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.

charcircuit 5 hours ago

X's algorithm no longer downranks for using links.

antiframe 23 minutes ago

Extraordinary claims should come with extraordinary evidence. Also, as a layman outside their system, how can you verify this?

Forgeties79 6 hours ago

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.

jakub_g 5 hours ago

In Instagram you can't really even put links at all. It's on purpose to keep you scrolling inside the walled garden.

codingisfreedom 7 hours ago

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.

probably_wrong 7 hours ago

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.

gilrain 6 hours ago

> I have some respect ... I cannot explain.

Naturally, they do it to earn "some respect" from those who otherwise see them clearly.

functionmouse 6 hours ago

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.

A_D_E_P_T 6 hours ago

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.

latexr 6 hours ago

> 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.

A_D_E_P_T 4 hours ago

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.

alerighi 6 hours ago

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.

A_D_E_P_T 4 hours ago

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.

boothby 6 hours ago

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.

cromka 6 hours ago

ZSTD as well.

latexr 6 hours ago

> 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.

TheOtherHobbes 5 hours ago

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.

wildzzz 6 hours ago

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.

philipallstar 6 hours ago

You've got to justify such a silly comparison.

Applejinx 6 hours ago

Agreed, it takes a lot more power and doesn't run nearly as cool as all that.

crest 6 hours ago

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.

crest 6 hours ago

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.

aaronrobinson 6 hours ago

> 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.

LadyCailin 5 hours ago

A modest proposal, really.

chneu 5 hours ago

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.

joshAg 4 hours ago

Unless the scantron corporation is so antisemitic they invented a time machine to participate in world war 2, I think you mean IBM.

Alifatisk 6 hours ago

> 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.

soperj 6 hours ago

> revolutionized the web

Personally I hate what react has done to the web.

mahboi 6 hours ago

Angular would've done the same thing but more poorly

dsauerbrun 6 hours ago

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.

calebio 6 hours ago

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.

__MatrixMan__ 6 hours ago

Did the makers of anuglarjs also have a conflict of interest? Or did they ruin the web just for the love of the game?

thesuitonym 6 hours ago

React was over a decade ago.

adamnemecek 6 hours ago

React is kinda shit.

alerighi 6 hours ago

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.

hnlmorg 6 hours ago

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)

DonHopkins 6 hours 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

blazing234 6 hours ago

React did not revolutionize the web. The fuck are you talking about?

thinkingtoilet 6 hours ago

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.

gunslinger_meta 6 hours ago

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.

bad_haircut72 6 hours ago

I dont think OF models are some paragon of virtue but theyre leagues ahead of engineers who choose to work at Meta

gunslinger_meta 6 hours ago

I agree, what I'm arguing is that money != respect as the parent asserted.

hnfong 6 hours ago

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.

blazing234 6 hours ago

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.

__MatrixMan__ 6 hours ago

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.

Taikonerd 6 hours ago

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.

yndoendo 6 hours ago

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.

jimbokun 6 hours ago

Thank God the teens have healthier outlets now like TikTok!

NoGravitas 6 hours ago

TikTok was actually pretty good before Larry the Lawnmower bought it.

xp84 5 hours ago

Citation needed. TikTok has always been brainrot.

xp84 5 hours ago

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.

Taikonerd 4 hours ago

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."

999900000999 6 hours ago

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.

Silamoth 5 hours ago

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.

999900000999 5 hours ago

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.

criddell 6 hours ago

The salaries aren't based on contribution to society, they are based on contribution to Meta. Fat salaries come from fat contributions.

giancarlostoro 6 hours ago

> 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.

thesuitonym 6 hours ago

> 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.

v3ss0n 6 hours ago

PyTorch .. React ..

That two libraries already build Frontend and AI.

lgl 6 hours ago

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

password54321 6 hours ago

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.

smashah 6 hours ago

thank you for saying this. We have to bring back shaming in tech.

mnd999 6 hours ago

> 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.

qurren 6 hours ago

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?

ipozgaj 6 hours ago

> 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.

blazing234 6 hours ago

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.

camoby 5 hours ago

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.

tiborsaas 5 hours ago

> 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.

Henchman21 6 hours ago

How have any of those made the world inhabited by humans in any way better?

NoGravitas 6 hours ago

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.

Bluescreenbuddy 6 hours ago

Some of that tech was developed over ten years ago

phatskat 6 hours ago

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.

iugtmkbdfil834 6 hours ago

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..

throw0101c 5 hours ago

> 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...

iugtmkbdfil834 5 hours ago

What is your point? That zstd cannot exist? That it shouldn't? I can't read minds you know.

TheOtherHobbes 5 hours ago

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.

throw0101c 4 hours ago

> 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)?

iugtmkbdfil834 3 hours ago

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.

throw0101c 3 hours ago

> 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...

iugtmkbdfil834 3 hours ago

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.

antiframe 17 minutes ago

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.

miltonlost 5 hours ago

"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!!!!"

iugtmkbdfil834 5 hours ago

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.

vel0city 3 hours ago

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.

iugtmkbdfil834 3 hours ago

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.

vel0city 3 hours ago

> 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?

iugtmkbdfil834 3 hours ago

<< 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.

vel0city 3 hours ago

> 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.

iugtmkbdfil834 2 hours ago

And we were doing so well.

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.

vel0city an hour ago

> 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".

benatkin 5 hours ago

Thanks for mentioning that. It reinforces my desire to avoid zstd because of its connection to Facebook.

iugtmkbdfil834 5 hours ago

One would hope, on technical grounds.

benatkin 5 hours ago

I was editing when your reply came out. Nope. Luckily it's a family of technologies.

iugtmkbdfil834 5 hours ago

Hey. If it makes you happy, who am I to judge.

tempestn 6 hours ago

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).

cmoski 5 hours ago

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.

tempestn 5 hours ago

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.

brendoelfrendo 6 hours ago

I would trade React for a world without Facebook any day of the week.

foobarian 5 hours ago

Tastes better, more filling

drstewart 5 hours ago

I don't get why people say Oppenheimer was a talented scientist when I don't want nuclear weapons to exist

saulpw 6 hours ago

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?

tempestn 6 hours ago

Is your sole measure of value whether you personally use a thing?

ipozgaj 5 hours ago

You use more than half of those on a daily basis just by using any piece of modern electronics or connecting to the internet.

saulpw 5 hours ago

I also "use" Facebook tracking and ads and I'm not psyched about that either!

ipozgaj 3 hours ago

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.

saulpw 2 hours ago

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.

smuhakg 5 hours ago

Yes, you've never used a React website in your life or downloaded something with zstd despite them being defaults on the internet.

the__alchemist 6 hours ago

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.

LadyCailin 5 hours ago

The Nazis pushed for anti smoking policies.

tbyehl 5 hours 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.

fasterik 6 hours ago

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.

hvb2 6 hours ago

If Facebook stopped working today, would anything happen? Besides people having a lot of new free time on on their hands?

fasterik 6 hours ago

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?

buriram 6 hours ago

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.

blazing234 6 hours ago

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.

buriram 6 hours ago

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.

LPisGood 6 hours ago

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.

jacquesm 6 hours ago

> 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.

krisoft 6 hours ago

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.

mancerayder 6 hours ago

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.

blazing234 6 hours ago

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.

qlte 8 minutes ago

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 can control it remotely with ADB. Plus sideload apps like Smarttube to watch ad-free YouTube.

User hostile stuff is much less aggravating to me if I'm also provided the means to bypass it.

yodsanklai 6 hours ago

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.

roadside_picnic 6 hours ago

> 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.

Quitschquat 6 hours ago

I saw the best minds of my generation consumed by Adtech, starving hysterical naked

GuB-42 5 hours ago

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.

deaux 4 hours ago

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.

Kim_Bruning 7 hours ago

Presumably this is an A/B test? I don't see how that's remotely sustainable

mondobe 7 hours ago

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.

bigbuppo 7 hours ago

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.

AndrewKemendo 7 hours ago

Agreed, they are eating the seed corn with this one

apercu 7 hours ago

One can hope.

grumpopotamus 6 hours ago

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.

ruszki 6 hours ago

History tells us that a large portion of the population can be out of touch. Sometimes almost everybody in a given society.

unnamed76ri 6 hours ago

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

somat 5 hours ago

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?

buildsjets 4 hours ago

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...

monocasa 3 hours ago

I just wish they'd stop buying promising stuff like Rivos that they're almost certain to ruin on their way down.

Doohickey-d 6 hours ago

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.

writtenone 7 hours ago

archived facebook help page, no trackers: https://nonograph.com/about-links-in-organic-facebook-page-p...

source: https://www.facebook.com/help/1929252614431792

Timshel 6 hours ago

I love that they specified that links in ads do not count

arjie 5 hours ago

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.

chihuahua 5 hours ago

> 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.

gregglain an hour ago

I joked to wife about paying for Facebook in 2011.

Monopolies suck.

nunez 3 hours ago

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.

dofm 5 hours ago

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.

pinevale 5 hours ago

> 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.

dofm 5 hours ago

> 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.

pinevale 4 hours ago

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).

xp84 5 hours ago

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.”

dofm 5 hours ago

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".

tapvt 6 hours ago

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.

alex1138 5 hours ago

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

TrackerFF 7 hours ago

Guess it's a tactic to go after bots and scammers?

geoffschmidt 6 hours ago

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.)

celsoazevedo 6 hours ago

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.

tapland 7 hours ago

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.

biker142541 6 hours ago

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.

woadwarrior01 6 hours ago

Perhaps share QR codes with links. :)

criddell 6 hours ago

Since links within Meta are free, maybe they are hoping you will bring all the external resources into some Meta property?

billyp-rva 6 hours ago

Probably. Their aim has always been to colonize the entire web.

fullshark 5 hours ago

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.

kalabrium 6 hours ago

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.

xlayn 5 hours ago

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...

bentt 4 hours ago

No municipal or public entity should use Facebook as a means of distributing information.

yipinwong 5 hours ago

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.

zahrevsky 6 hours ago

Do they even know what H stands for in HTML?

1970-01-01 5 hours ago

>Don't know why we bother with them.

It's very much a bandwagon mentality. "We" is you.

ktosobcy 4 hours ago

Extortionist mafia is getting more extorionist...

EU should just blok meta(fb/inst)/x|twatter/tiktok and rest of usanian BigTech at this point…

twodave 5 hours ago

Almost certainly a way to mitigate bots and spam. Not surprised in the slightest.

billyp-rva 6 hours ago

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.