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Comment by ape4 | Hacker News Reader

Facebook is a parasite of the real internet. Videos from other sites are embedded in your Facebook feed. You watch them on Facebook, comment on Facebook.

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That's not parasitism, embedding content is the way the "real internet" is supposed to work. And all of that embedded content on Facebook links back to the original site, anyway. People add meta tags and social graph tags to their sites for a reason.

And anyway, that seems an odd criticism to make on a forum built around the same basic principle - people link content here, and discuss it here as well.

It's parasitic because of its particular approach. For example, it could embed youtube videos... so that the real creators get their pay, but no, Facebook would rather that the videos be Facebook videos, thereby the original creator getting zero profit from his hard work.

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6A1Lt0kvMA for a first-hand account of the situation.

Sometimes people even post the videos to HN or Reddit, and people comment on there as well.

Facebook has made it very difficult to share videos from their platform with other services.

It's not even just video. I often want to share an article link to another application starting from the FB app's internal web view, and I always have to use safari as an intermediary before being "allowed" (can't believe im Jain this word but his really is what it comes down to) to do so.

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