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Comment by runarberg | Hacker News Reader

All these open graph data tags (!) and half of them redundant.

I’m gonna be the one to complain about it here. Why are we adhering to a proprietary format by facebook when equivalent meta tags exists. e.g. why is og:description a thing when we have <meta name="description"> and why specify og:title when <title> is literally the only contented tag required by the HTML standard (so all websites are required to have one).

This reminds me of a post from yesterday: “We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis”[1]. And a poor one at that indeed.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26941332

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Because when someone (or our social media team/agency) shares one of our pages on FB we want it to look nice.

Then a follow up question: Why are the scrapers on FB, Twitter, etc. so dumb? Why can’t they fall back to <title> if <meta name="og:title"> is missing? Why is it my job to make things look nice on their platforms, when all the metadata they require is already there?

Optimal Titles are different lengths for different use cases for FB and Twitter ideally you want a call to action shorter title as compared to a longer optimised page <title>

It still begs the question: What about the—in my experience—more common use case where they are the same (i.e. current title and description is sufficient for social shares)?

Here is an example of a discord server refusing the expand the site description and title on one of my sites[1], just because there is no og:title and og:description (even though I provide both <title> and <meta name="description">).

All I can take from this is either: a) Social media companies are bad at (or don’t care about) implementing common sense features, or b) Facebook is actively and aggressively pushing their own proprietary format over established standards. In either case it is bad.

1: https://forums.online-go.com/t/random-starting-position-flex...

"og:title" falls back to <title>. My <title> tags include the title of the website _and_ the title of the page. I put _just_ the page title in "og:title".

"og:image" has no standard alternative.

The rest are usually not needed. og:description falls back to meta description just fine.

I wish there was a metadata tag that could prevent sharing on social media platforms.

What if you set og:image to a female-presenting nipple?

You used to be able to prevent sharing by blocking their "thumbnail generator" requests via firewall. Or block entire range such as "2a03:2880::/32".

I haven't looked into this method's feasibility in years though. I imagine there are much better ways they protect outbound clicks from their apps these days.

All your content are belong to us.

" why is og:description a thing when we have <meta name="description"> and why specify og:title when <title>"

.....

Because facebook/twitter/linkedin have different ways to display information and sometimes what's inside the description (for SEO purposes) is NOT the same as what you want displayed on a social media platform or other outlet for your content!

<title>, <meta name="description" ...> nearly always get used to optimise for Google and not the end user of a social media platform.

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