Facebook Pages require paid subscription to post more than two links per month
mastodon.gamedev.place
mastodon.gamedev.place
I know it's all speculation, and this does come across as more monetization creep, but I can't help to wonder if there's an underlying reason beyond "line go up".
So it's not necessarily clickbait -- seems to be also an evolved workaround to fight throttling. :-/
Bluesky the company/app certainly isn't perfect, but the model they pioneer is very much designed to help fix this exact problem.
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...
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.
And I'm not discussing emotionally-heavy, but public standing within the community you've convinced to trust you with their social media algorithm
In your view, contrary to the lobster.rs post, running the server should instead cost $1,500/month and goes up exponentially to support a handful of users. Have I got you right?
How is having a good public standing to a very vocal minority about modern day sensitive topics not a high emotional cost to bear?
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.
The exact same thing can be said about running an ATProto AppView vs a PDS.
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.
Belief isn't necessary when you have facts.
Yes!! You’re getting it! This is what they’re optimizing for. Have been for a decade plus.
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.
People don't like change, this will be a non-story in a year.
Then downrank them.
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.
Try logging out for a few days and watch the extremely vague (and sometimes OUTRIGHT FAKE) email notifications roll in
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.
My friend groups are all moving to Partiful to plan events for example because so many of us are getting off Facebook
Not the same as town level engagement obviously, but a sign the audience is moving
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45795104
I would say that the missing link in the discussion is that the valuable data they are mining is social networks and the fidelity of their data there is of a much higher fidelity than what FB or IG provides since these are in-person events, typically.
This is an entire arm of marketing research: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01482...
Also all those data promises go out the window as soon as they are acquired. Then it's Privacy Policy updates with retroactive addendums. Would be very surprised if that wasn't the ultimate goal.
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.
Those comments you mentioned are a bit of a problem. Whenever admin complains about them I always say, "You're using Facebook. What do you expect? Only retired people, idiots, and bots are on there."
They never seem to understand what I'm talking about because, unfortunately, most of the folks in wildfire admin are 50+ years old
A fair number - not all - I am convinced are foreign trolls, or bots. There's something which just feels a bit different from a normal partisan, and the kinds of folks who invade every regional (town, county, etc.) group and post nonstop partisan dreck. Their profiles are off in some way, and the hours they are posting are all over the map.
FB does have the "big tent" thing going on, where they wanted to become the tool for every possible organizing principle. So you do get some of the legitimately most wacky people on the internet as well.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
It was extraordinarily telling when Nazi musk showed country flags to IP on shitter. The amount of astroturfing happening to local discussions is terrible. And who is doing this? Countries where 1$ is a day's or 2 days propaganda wages.
And my community is one of those "only facebook" government messaging areas. And what do they get? 1/2 are real locals, the other half who knows. But what I do know, is that they smell like AI created profiles, and primed for propaganda.
Not that NextDoor is any less toxic or useful, but your hyperlocal government agencies may be signed up there, as well. NextDoor has a dedicated "Public Agencies" tab/feed where you can ignore all the hoi polloi, if you so wish.
Many "real accounts" on NextDoor actually disclose their home neighborhood, although I have no idea if/how they filter out the liars and impostors and bots.
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.
I am in a few photography groups and see some photos people want comments on all the time and I'm always saying "It's not the length of the lens but how you use it" and stuff like that.
I find out about community events like local bands and broom dancing all the time on Facebook... Students do tell me though that they think it is dead.
Its ubiquitous for reselling.
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.
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.
Nowadays I sign into my FB account every 3-6 months or so to find something specific about someone, and I see that my feed is dominated by 4-5 people (out of around 1,000 "friends"). If I'm curious and start searching for other friends specifically, nearly all of of them have not posted in years.
Sure, there are some active community-type spaces there, but that is a very small part of what FB used to be.
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.
Glad I don't spend time there anymore either.
Unless they are in a developing country or a place where young people have very low agency, such as southeast Asia. For instance, in the Philippines, Facebook might as well be the internet. People there actually do believe FB is "the internet" and it's the only app they use on their phones.
Generally you can't function here without Meta: businesses are either on FB or Instagram (with some on TikTok too), and some people exclusively communicate via Messenger on data only plans where FB data is subsidized by the telco.
It was quite sad when we moved here and had just executed a personal extraction from all Meta properties. When in Rome, I guess.
If you have kids in school there, you can't keep up with school news, closings, etc. unless you're on Facebook. The schools, teachers, PTA, everything is on Facebook. All restaurants are on Facebook. Every single government entity and office is on Facebook. All DM traffic is on Messenger. Anybody selling anything is on Marketplace.
"What's so bad about that?" you might ask. It's this: in many cases, the only way you can contact any of these entities is on Facebook. When you try to explain to Filipinos that Facebook is a walled garden and a silo, they look at you as if smoke is coming out of their ears—they just can't comprehend data freedom and independence because these concepts are extremely impaired in their culture.
It's really depressing to think about these people's lives, but nobody should get too depressed because they don't know any better and are satisfied to be cattle. They'll happily use their device for absolutely nothing else but to flip between Facebook and Mobile Legends all day, every day, completely unaware that there's a whole other online world out there.
The 2020s are a war on hyperlinks. It is particularly unfortunate to see this masquerading as a concern for safety and security (“everything outside of our platform is scary and insecure”)
I get that Facebook is trying to make some $$$ on them here, but I wasn't aware we had any war (not even a "war on Christmas" fake war) going on against links.
https://dev.to/ascorbic/bring-back-the-twitter-link-preview-...
It's not only Facebook doing it, but they are probably the biggest offender.
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.
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.
The algorithm is open source and does not include logic for down ranking external links.
It's always like this. Just keep adding layers of friction until people don't bother. Engagement is still the obsession.
These people have arguably contributed nothing to society for over a decade (and maybe even made it worse in some instances) for very fat salaries, and yet they’re being praised for being the example of best engineers.
I periodically use their websites and they’re horrible!
Seriously, we should know better as the dev-tech society.
And I don’t give a darn about their research that is being built on top of barely legal mass surveillance so don’t tell me their contributions from stealing data were helpful.
How does this work fits with their mission of destroying the fabric of society and the mental well-being of teenagers, I cannot explain.
Naturally, they do it to earn "some respect" from those who otherwise see them clearly.
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.
Are you being sarcastic? Please let it be that you’re being sarcastic.
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.
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.
Their mission is to make Zuckerberg rich and powerful. That’s the sole purpose of Meta, everything else is incidental. It just so happens that they also destroy the fabric of society and the mental well-being of teenagers but it’s not their primary goal, they just don’t care about the side effect. It would be all the same if they were poisoning coral reefs and giving wedgies to grandmothers instead. As long as the process benefits Zuckerberg in the end, nothing else matters to the company.
We used to have something resembling a democracy, now we have an evolving neo-fascist hellscape created by a cabal of the least interesting tech people on the planet.
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.
This is the funniest thing I’ve read on here.
Meta's ultimate goal is immoral. It's not justified if a few projects do some good.
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.
Personally I hate what react has done to the web.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://arunatalent.com/blog/how-much-do-onlyfans-creators-m...
Like, even in its heyday, it was such an attention trap, and it had very negative effects on the people who got addicted (especially teens).
But the site has gotten so much worse in the past couple years, and its brand is in the garbage. Maybe that's all for the best -- it was never really worth preserving.
There needs to be an easy to use low-cost, possible also advertisement driven, alternative that business can latch to so more can leave facebook.
I actively refuse to support Meta and block all their domain names in case of clicking on a tiny URL that sends me to their site. It also helps block their analytics used by 3rd parties. I will forever be a sunk cost for them.
Anymore, putting up a basic template page for your business is maybe 2-3 hours if you're really non-technical. Sure, it will be just the basic template, but there's very little need for more customization than that. That hypothetical coffee bar really just needs a place to post hours, their menu, and maybe update with specials if they're ambitious. That's about all you get with a Facebook page anyway, there's zero customization.
Example; I have been at a local restaurant were the WIFI was not working properly so they could not do check out at the table. You and I would know how to fix this with placement and picking equipment. The whole restaurant staff did not. Number of the staff were younger and grew up with the technology.
You’re arguably a war criminal either way, might as well get top dollar.
I’ll still take a half million dollar Meta job though.
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.
By whom? I haven't seen anyone say something positive about Meta or their employees for at least 15 years, unless you count people who were being paid to write PR articles.
That two libraries already build Frontend and AI.
And yes, I mean facebook.com
I don’t think that’s a maybe. There’s actual research on social media addiction. For me, getting off Facebook improved my life.
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?
React, React Native, GraphQL, LLama, PyTorch, RocksDB, Cassandra, folly, Hack, HHVM, OCP, Presto, btrfs, cgroupsv2/PSI, eBPF, zstd, roughly 12% of all Linux kernel contributions are signed off by Meta + Meta is the 5th biggest contributor to Linux kernel.
Also a ton of other projects that did not originally come out of Meta but get a ton of patches and support/funding: MySQL, Memcached, Hadoop, LLVM, Systemd, Rust, Python etc.
Perhaps research a bit more before you make these ignorant comments.
I don't know anything about the other things so I can't say if they are good or not. But acting as if react is some big invention is crazy. bell Labs gave us Unix and C. Meta isn't even close to inventing something like that.
You can have a lot of beef with react, but this is the lamest one. Of course it solves many problems, that's why it landed at the top. It took the C out of MVC, it made view rendering deterministic and simplified event management. It also stayed somewhat stable on the API side over the years.
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.
My subtle point is that there are a lot of real reasons to dislike Meta. No reason to have hate blind you..
"Amnesty report finds Facebook amplified hate ahead of Rohingya massacre in Myanmar":
* https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/amnesty-report-finds-face...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_genocide#Facebook_con...
And React, although the jury remains out on whether that's a transformative technology or... not.
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)?
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.
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...
"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.
edit:
I am not even baiting you man. I am just not sure why you have a beein your bonnet.
If you outsourced the murder to someone else, how many people would you be OK with murdering?
Wouldn't it be better if we didn't continue to support corporations who enable genocide around the world?
Now, ultimately I'll still end up using zstd. I'm not happy about it's ties to Facebook. But it's code that exists out there now, I don't see the reason to not use it. But I'll still try and avoid giving Facebook any money or praise. I don't give praise to Facebook engineers, at least not ones recently working there. They're massively paid in blood money, and they should already understand that by now. Their products hurt societies around the world, and they don't actually change.
You're wearing shoes, aren't you? Own a smartphone? Drive a hybrid? Use a computer? Ever eaten a banana? Bought something from Amazon? Turned on the air conditioning? Somewhere down those supply chains, someone suffered for your convenience. Every purchase is an atrocity by proxy. Every breath is stolen oxygen. Every step displaces an innocent insect. Your very existence is an ongoing ecological war crime. And you have the audacity to sit there, wearing pants assembled by strangers, pretending your hands are clean?
Repent, sinner. Atone.
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?
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.
This doesn't square with your "Zstd is worth a lot of other's people's pain" earlier statement. So what is it, you just don't care to actually be the one to inflict such pain? You're entirely OK with the idea that by championing zstd and telling people "its worth a lot of other's people's pain", knowing that by other's people's pain we're talking genocide, suicide, and deaths due to misinformation, so long as its not you specifically having to do that? Why is that?
You've already stated its definitely worth it. Just not worth it for you to pull the trigger, but worth it enough for you to champion somebody else to pull the trigger?
Personally I'd never say a compression algorithm is worth a genocide.
<< I even mentioned I'll continue to use zstd. I totally get that by using zstd I'm not directly supporting these things. But acting like "hey Facebook is great and its perfectly fine tons of people died directly to finance zstd's development" is IMO a bad take on the whole situation.
Then, based on your line of argumentation, you are simply a hypocrite; very pedestrian ( I am personally disappointed ). You are perfectly ok with using zstd knowing that it indirectly supports company and the evil deeds it bestows upon the world while knowing it to be true AND lecturing others about the evil deeds they do.
<< You've already stated its definitely worth it. Just not worth it for you to pull the trigger, but worth it enough for you to champion somebody else to pull the trigger?
Again, are you using a computer terminal to type those letters in? Are those letters worth the lives that made it possible for you to have this philosophical treatise on why you feel morally superior to me?
Yes? Then maybe you shouldn't, because you explicitly are not.
You are just like all the other kids out there unable to actually stand by what you claim to believe.
Me? I just live it.
<< Personally I'd never say a compression algorithm is worth a genocide.
You know.. I have rather fascinating realization. Maybe it is true that you would never say it. That is simply not done. You would just let it happen should the compression compressed enough. How do I know? You already stated you will continue to use it.
Heh.
Sorry man. I expected better.
> 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".
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).
I mean, Hack? Who cares?
So when we talk about what they contributed to society, I think it's mostly that. It's not some life altering service in any benevolent way. I would think it's more likely life altering in the negative way. It started out as a useful thing, it turned into a monster turning addiction into profit.
> Why do you care how other people choose to spend their time?
I don't, we were discussing what it added to society.
> Is it the technology you don't like, or the people who use it?
It is the long list of abuses of people's weaknesses for profit.
I'm not defending FB practices, I'm stating it has value beyond the hyperbole.
> heaps of small venues would see their online presence deleted overnight
Static hosting has been a solved problem for decades. Plenty of options for small businesses at a negligible cost per month.
Now tell me where else can I find such a company having that?
I only care about competitive programming and solve algorithm problem. Nothing else matter: I don't care about product, frontend, security, data pipeline, bla bla nonsense.
And by the way, $400k+ salary in cash and RSU please. No stock options, thank you.
And by the way, you fought through all of that for a $15k-20k ARR contract. Never again, thank you.
Oh, and the PMs are just drones sitting in a room doing nothing but talks and herding the engineers like chicken, and try to claim credits for all the work engineers do. Never met a competent PM in my life.
* Product design / product engineering / full stack engineering are totally killed by AI. I can clone Tailwind and integrate in my repo in 30 minutes with Claude Code, good riddance.
* System design is very much about "who can bullshit more and better", a literal description of practicing something that you would never do during your day to day work.
* Startups are full of nonsenses from VC like "you are ex-Googler, here's $10M for you to build internal dashboard". Then you get the likes of Retool with a bunch of salesreps who try to justify their existence by selling you stuffs you never want and never use in your life outside work. If you work there as "founding engineer", I wish you good luck.
* AI/ML (NeuRIPS) are 60k papers, most of them AI generated and AI reviewed. Yeah, good luck sorting through those noises.
Then tell me, my friend, what's the alternative? Maybe it's easier to spin up a trading bot and trade how many times Trump mention X, Y, Z.
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.
> 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.
But from a technical perspective, Google breaks constantly. Here's one. On Pixel you could use Assistant to start a timer or open an application. For years. Then Gemini is forced (first opt in, then forced, as is the Google Way)- there's no way to turn off voice out loud response, and opening apps - the most basic thing - doesn't work.
Then you have long-standing headaches like Gmail interface, reports of people's businesses getting blocked on Google Workspace, etc.
Facebook is blamed for that data broker scandal and making us hate our families due to political arguments. Google does all the same data broker stuff, and other than not being a forever scroll social media site, it's morally and technically repugnant.
It ain't the same as the Bell Labs days. They try to larp as if they are the computer scientists of old but none of them are. They are just there for the salary and prestige and that's it.
I applied there a long time ago and they seemed more interested in my math background and schooling and coding than my work experience.
Plus sideload apps like Smarttube to watch ad-free YouTube that would never be allowed on Play Store/App Store for either Android/iOS.
User hostile stuff out of the box is much less aggravating to me if I'm also provided the means to bypass it. Even if it's mildly inconvenient to setup, it's still vastly better than the alternative.
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.
For a fairly sizable portion of the population (especially the tech worker population), salary/TC is seen as the measure of someone's value as a human being. I've had acquaintances who really, sincerely struggled to understand the concept than an engineer making 1/N what an engineer at Meta/Google/etc does could be overall a better engineer. The typical reply has been something along the lines of "but if they're better, why don't they just make more money?"
They really couldn't understand when I tried to explain that, in my experience, nearly all the really brilliant and interesting technical people I knew tended to be making less, because they would rather work on interesting problems with a high degree of control than play leveling games at a large corporation.
The former is just wrong in the case of Meta, you don't need to look far to find many of their contributions. The latter is debatable, but it is not what you said.
There is also a difference between the company as a whole and the people working for it. Their "very fat salaries" can let them support noble causes, or not, they are people, in all their complexity, not just machine parts.
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.
If you still work there, you're a garbage human being. It's that simple. You are a POS that deserves no harbor or shelter from any right-thinking tech worker.
(All here have noticed how you no longer highlight your workplace. Apparently shame is useful for something, if not enough.)
https://www.inc.com/erik-sherman/sears-ceo-eddie-lampert-sho...
https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/4385-failing-to-plan-h...
Therefore "Facebook now charging to post more than 2 links a month" is false. It appears that this is some restriction applied to organic marketing.
I think the article says you can't post links from your FB page to external sites. What you're describing is the opposite: links from outside FB to an FB page. Of course they don't mind when you bring traffic to FB.
Free or $14.99/mo - 2 links
$49.99/mo - 8 links
$149.99/mo - 20 links
$499.99/mo - unlimited links
The few groups I'm in, local wildlife and pet bird groups, mainly consist of people asking questions that need to and are usually answered by posting links to local resources or regulations.
I 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.
You get both the safety of a public place to meet and identity verification through your post office representative
Seems like a win for everyone and we get FB out of the way
I don't miss it, though I feel uncomfortable about the situation. Recovery has not been worth the time involved.
What sucks is that now I can't see a whole ton of local content: local event organizers, small businesses, municipal offices and agencies, community groups, etc. have all consolidated on "facebook" as where every announcement goes.
I hope they continue to make it a more obviously hostile walled garden and that organizations of all kinds move away. The network effect it has may be hard to overcome, however.
Never mind the fact his platform has routinely chipped away at privacy in the past, posts suspiciously going from Friends to Friends of Friends or Public. Like you can set it and it will straight up come unset
But it's totally cool to just lock things down for accounts only if you're Facebook, and never mind people get banned all the time for bullshit, horrible things that people report are never taken down, and it's apparently increasingly impossible to even make a new account
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.
The threshold isn't for your grandpa, it's for Facebook Pages, which are basically landing pages for businesses on Facebook. And I think it's chosen very deliberately: so that you can set up your page for free, promote it, and then realize you need to pay to keep it alive.
Yes, I understood this, thanks.
It doesn't at all change my point: one of Facebook's biggest problems is deceptive pages that clone user content for clout, mislead users and then ultimately direct them for scams.
If you set a limit of five posts a month without paying, you would perhaps only punish fake pages, which are a high volume game.
Bot 1: “I have been using the services of Mr Bob John who is a financial advisor, he has made me $70,000 in the past six months. Very trustworthy”
Bot 2: “Oh wow! Will you please share how I can contact him?”
Bot 1: “sure, you can message him on Telegram. His username is BobJohn983739257”
Bot 3: “I have also used Mr Bob John services. He has been a reliable and faithful advisor.”
I think you could more or less instaban users who mention Telegram and nothing of value would be lost.
I see comment likes and replies from users called "Congratulations you've won…" or "Message me to win your prize" and if you report those, they are actually pretty much always removed (easy pattern I guess).
But nobody seems to have any luck with reporting fake celebrity scams, to the point that if you are a well-known user who has more comments than you can reply to, you more or less have to regularly post a video saying "I will never message you directly".
Oh for sure. But they'd just switch to saying "†e|_e gr@mm" or something. It does seem to me like the cheapest models today should be cheap and good enough to finally kill off this type of spam, though, if deployed correctly.
My preference would be that spam comments detected in this way get a bit set on them that causes them to be visible only to their posters, and posting more than one just causes all your future comments to also get that bit regardless of their content, but since it's a shadowban, it's harder for spammers to know that their account is burned.
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...
Not defending it, just explaining the logic and why it might work even if it seems superficially stupid.
1. This will force users to keep sharing 2. get more ADs revenue 3. People get fed up and switch to $50/ month plan
similar to how Youtube did. I am fed up and ended up signing upf or youtube premimum.
I've been researching local newspapers, and the problems they face, lately, and one of them is that none of the social media sites allow them to get any visits from their followers because they either significantly de-rank posts with links off-site or it costs money to reach followers with links, or both. Of course Google scraping their sites and summarizing is another symptom of the same problem; FAANG wants all the revenue and a monopoly on what you see. Every penny every eyeball. None for small businesses, none for independent media, none for individuals.
The way I saw it put recently: the internet used to be a library and now it's a store.
Often those small rural papers are the organ for county or municipal government (e.g. for publishing legal notices and such), and they have print editions because it's required by law.
But, I don't think there's any way to sustainably run a for-profit newsroom in a small town, without grants and large donors, print or web or some combination of the two.
It's very much a bandwagon mentality. "We" is you.
EU should just blok meta(fb/inst)/x|twatter/tiktok and rest of usanian BigTech at this point…
So many pages link out to other things, including major news sites.
This will either get reverted or Facebook will die. Mark's choice.
If your facebook page were your hosted website, everything's fine and dandy. Cost is still zero!
This move punishes people who do have their own website that they are paying for, and also have a facebook page that links to the main site.
in fact... maybe kids think of instagram as a boomer unc platform now too.
Monopolies suck.
Good deals and things can still certainly be found on Craigslist, and there seems to have been a rebound lately in use, but for a while there all that was left on Craigslist was old timers and resellers.
We have the internet and that's not good enough
You already throttle posts - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14147719
You already act as a piss-poor communications medium https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6090712
Is "Metaverse" open web/open protocol? Or just yet another way for Zuckerberg to fuck people over?
I don't like this but also don't see how this can be different in the real world.
By banning spammers and scammers. Facebook opts not to ban scammers, as it's a significant portion of their revenue, and the latest AI slop is very good for engagement.
https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...
- we had this link limit for a few months already
- every business portal to upload content etc is super buggy, just shows loading spinners, you never know if a post has worked or not
- we're locked out of our instagram account as we took it over from old owners who don't know password and none of the reset options arrive even though they have access to them
- we finally got an email 2fa to go through to recover the account and that then asked for the SMS too, which never arrives
- there is of course absolutely no way to contact support
Unfortunately it's the only platform all our customers are on. They don't even have Google accounts, it's all WhatsApp, Facebook and phones.
Generating slop content is cheap now, but you need to store it and very few people will see it, so you can't show more ads.
Engineers are enablers at best. If you are not trapped there by visa issues or vesting problems you should take your money and RUN.
* Facebook with this and its new scraping rules for business accounts
* Turning Venezuela into a fiefdom
* Skydance merger
and on and on. But it's not late stage. It's just capitalism and we'll be reading about the same behavior 10 years from now.
Ask the average citizen there in a couple years, and if they’re not better off than they were under their dictator, I’ll eat crow.
(No real dispute on the other two examples).
Western Hemisphere nations who choose to ally with the US seem way better off in terms of economic prosperity than those who chose communism and/or to ally with US enemies. Mexico for instance got NAFTA, a giant boost to their economy (even at the expense of US workers).
The only big exception I'd point to is Puerto Rico, which is in the closest association they could get, being part of the US and yet gets the shaft in just about every way.
I barely use fb as it is and this will just drive me off the platform entirely
Nothing much left to innovate.
You or I could put up an html site and host it on Cloudflare Workers for a total cost of 0 + the domain reg. But mom and pop don’t even know what html is and are too cheap to pay $500 (and some ongoing cost to a local “we build and host your website” firm to do it.
They could probably pay for Squarespace and just tell an AI “here’s a Word doc of my menu, build me a site for my restaurant” but Squarespace just isn’t free.
Those hyperlinks ain't free, you know.
Embrace, extend, extinguish
The precision and recall tradeoffs are difficult and all scenarios lead to people being unhappy. Not to mention the politics of big corporations where anti abuse systems usually stand in opposition to company goals which makes getting any change through difficult.
Honestly, the best thing YouTube could do to help protect users would be to shift to moderated comments only. If the video creator or their designated moderator doesn’t choose to explicitly show a comment, it should go in a black hole. Or even better, offer a service for a small fee relative to your channel’s revenue, which uses a Gemini flash model to approve on-topic comments. Creators can choose to invest either their time or their money, or just have no comments.