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.
> 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, roughly 12% of all Linux kernel contributions are signed off by Meta + Meta is the 5th biggest contributor to Linux kernel.
Perhaps research a bit more before you make these ignorant comments.
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.
It's like the best of the best mechanical and electrical engineers have teamed up to build the world's most efficient orphan crushing machine. It sips power, runs cool, requires almost no maintenance, and pulverizes orphans into dense little cubes for easy clean up.
Also it has a glorious viewing gallery to watch and listen to a thousand doomed orphans get fed to Zuckerberg’s ego so it can illuminate the path to total enshittification.
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.
> their mission of destroying the fabric of society and the mental well-being of teenagers
Their mission is to make Zuckerberg rich and powerful. That’s the sole purpose of Meta, everything else is incidental. It just so happens that they also destroy the fabric of society and the mental well-being of teenagers but it’s not their primary goal, they just don’t care about the side effect. It would be all the same if they were poisoning coral reefs and giving wedgies to grandmothers instead. As long as the process benefits Zuckerberg in the end, nothing else matters to the company.
It opened the floodgates, though. It was a real paradigm shift. After LLaMa, everybody saw that you could release large open models without any negative repercussions, and DeepSeek et al. hopped aboard the wagon. LLaMa was the first popular model that was truly open to the global public.
Meta earned a ton of goodwill by doing this -- it was very brave, and very influential. In my eyes, it outweighs everything negative they've ever done.
Let's stop saying that open weight models are open source. They are just a software that you can run on your own hardware (if you have a ton of money to spend to get it anyway) but they are not open, they are as open as any proprietary software that you can run on your PC is.
You can't study them, you can't modify them, you can't improve them, you can't look into how they are built etc.
> These people have arguably contributed nothing to society for over a decade
Not as FB. But they have shipped a lot of useful stuff. That doesn't mean the company is suddenly great and all should be forgiven but there is some nuance here.
In addition to all of their open source contributions, their ability to pay a ton of money and fun problems to solve led a lot of fantastic engineers to want to work there — especially before 2015.
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.
In a weird way, I'm kind of glad that they're ruining facebook.com.
Like, even in its heyday, it was such an attention trap, and it had very negative effects on the people who got addicted (especially teens).
But the site has gotten so much worse in the past couple years, and its brand is in the garbage. Maybe that's all for the best -- it was never really worth preserving.
The issue is that small business still utilize them instead of paying for and maintaining a web site. Want to know our business ours, events, or when we close early ... facebook.
There needs to be an easy to use low-cost, possible also advertisement driven, alternative that business can latch to so more can leave facebook.
I actively refuse to support Meta and block all their domain names in case of clicking on a tiny URL that sends me to their site. It also helps block their analytics used by 3rd parties. I will forever be a sunk cost for them.
> These people have arguably contributed nothing to society for over a decade […] they’re being praised for being the example of best engineers.
React? We can all criticize it, but it has revolutionized the web. Llama. Did you forget what sparked the whole open-weight wave? It was that. I dislike Meta, but I would not criticize the engineers competence. They have done impressive things, check out their blog if you genuinely are curious.
React ruined the web, and the mobile development too.
Now to load a simple website that in the past was a few kB of HTML, CSS and JS you need to download Mb of JS code. Now the browser needs to use Mb of RAM just to display a stupid webpage.
For what? It was better when we had PHP pages that did produce HTML on the server side.
Another thing to me that we have to get Meta discredit for, not something good in any way.
The web was broken long before React came along. Or have you forgotten about Angular, incompatibilities between JS engines that required hacks like jQuery, the Internet Explorer monopoly, and those who gave up on the stagnating specifications from w3c entirely so wrote their sites in Flash?
what is react responsible for? If you're referring to the explosion of SPAs, I think you should direct your blame to angularjs... React was just a better version of that revolution.
Agreed. React, imo, was a much better Backbone.js. Relatively lightweight primitives, composition, and JSX made building frontend applications fun without having to wire up everything by hand.
> 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.
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.
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?
Society basically says money = good. God forbid we treat a sex worker with respect but if you're precious little Johnny works at Facebook finding new and exciting ways to get teenagers even more addicted to their phones it's all good because he makes a lot of money and money = good.
There are tons of sex workers that rake in money that even FAANG engineers will never see in 10 lives (e.g OF 'models'). I doubt much of society has any respect for them though.
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.
There is nothing special about the engineering behind React. Success simply compounds, if big company X does something everyone else must do it, which leads to more contributors, which leads to more visibility.
Even being the creators of React still wasn't enough to fix their shitshow of a website with a bazillion anti-patterns and the worse, most annoying UX of all time.
> and 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.
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.
In the 2010s, there was a move away from files in the name of convenience (lock-in).
The 2020s are a war on hyperlinks. It is particularly unfortunate to see this masquerading as a concern for safety and security (“everything outside of our platform is scary and insecure”)
I get that Facebook is trying to make some $$$ on them here, but I wasn't aware we had any war (not even a "war on Christmas" fake war) going on against links.
I wonder if this is an effort to combat pages which post a short clickbait description and require you to click "read more" to see the full description, and often post the link in the comments. There are lots of sites (Polygon immediately comes to mind) which are notorious for doing this as a way to get fake engagement which boosts their posts which gets more clickbait engagement.
I know it's all speculation, and this does come across as more monetization creep, but I can't help to wonder if there's an underlying reason beyond "line go up".
I have a friend who is a best-selling author, and her threads account was being heavily throttled (hundreds of likes a few months ago, fewer than ten now) -- it was suggested that it's because she is posting links away from Meta properties, and the way around it was this "link in the comments" tactic.
So it's not necessarily clickbait -- seems to be also an evolved workaround to fight throttling. :-/
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.
I didn't know this and kept sharing links on my new page and it was banned from posting.I tried to look for support but just received responses from bots all the time and no human review until I gave up. I ended up starting another page.
Remember how Sears was a thing but they kept making dumb decisions and were also unable to adapt to new realities? Facebook/Meta is like that. Doomed company walking.
Sometimes I have thoughts like this, but then I get on the subway and watch everyone around me endlessly scroll Instagram while their brains melt out their ears, and then I decide that I was the one who was out of touch.
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
LinkedIn has seriously deranked posts with links in the past. Everything within Meta is heavily A/B tested, but it seems feasible that this will become real.
Instagram already does charge for outgoing links, so I would assume that they found that they can sustainably make money with it there, and that it should work on FB too.
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.
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.
I think this is far too charitable an interpretation. They could just ban spammers. Facebook doesn’t want links going off of their platform because they get paid for people staying on their platform and looking at ads.
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.)
Surveillance capitalists have built a truly miserable internet.
I've been researching local newspapers, and the problems they face, lately, and one of them is that none of the social media sites allow them to get any visits from their followers because they either significantly de-rank posts with links off-site or it costs money to reach followers with links, or both. Of course Google scraping their sites and summarizing is another symptom of the same problem; FAANG wants all the revenue and a monopoly on what you see. Every penny every eyeball. None for small businesses, none for independent media, none for individuals.
Is this not a good idea? It makes average users more selective about what content they are sharing, and reduces scam/bot content that can currently spam post links for free.
Facebook knows what you want to see, because you can follow pages and individuals. They choose to show those scam/bot posts to you anyway. This isn't to fight bots.
Very few spam/scam posts I see rely on external links. FB is an all in one scammers paradise. This just seems like a transparent attempt to keep people on platform.
Those 35 links to "you wouldn't believe which politician wants to kill our kids now" type posts are why I quit facebook. There is value in know what my friends are doing, but the negative value of that hate isn't worth it.
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.
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.
This is a bi-directional play. For the vast majority that dont, this is an attempt to get more content INSIDE the facebook ecosystem as a moat, and for those that need outside content links they will pay since its a organic premium conversion.
Not defending it, just explaining the logic and why it might work even if it seems superficially stupid.
I suffer using it because many people jumped ship from Craigslist to Facebook Marketplace.
Good deals and things can still certainly be found on Craigslist, and there seems to have been a rebound lately in use, but for a while there all that was left on Craigslist was old timers and resellers.
I hate to devil's advocate this. But is the observed behavior of 'is this an outgoing link' the only practical way to defend against external bot advertising campaigns? Aside from Facebook obviously wanting you to pay them for advertising, how does any independent forum deal with this at scale without banning links?
"how does any independent forum deal with this at scale without banning links?"
By banning spammers and scammers. Facebook opts not to ban scammers, as it's a significant portion of their revenue, and the latest AI slop is very good for engagement.
They are in the squeezing what's left position for that platform. Young kids think of facebook like we think of myspace. Social media as a platform in fact may just be over. my kids don't really use social media, they use whatsapp/iphone groups.
in fact... maybe kids think of instagram as a boomer unc platform now too.
While it's been longer-lasting than many, social media is a fad and all fads eventually decline. Fundamentally it doesn't do anything that can't be done in a group chat. Thanks to the "forever memory" of the internet, people have learned the risks of posting anything where it will be scraped and preserved for eternity, ready to haunt you when it's most awkward.
Can we just stop using Facebook as a defacto business/organizational page? come on people. I've been login-gated from what should be public pages for the better part of a decade now.
On Google's Youtube to post links (like in video descriptions, etc) you have to pay by adding sellable/monetarily valuable personally identifying information to your account like a phone number and ID. Otherwise even with a google account from 2006 in good standing you can't post links anymore. Attempts to edit old video descriptions with HTTP/S links (from before the policy) also don't work.
I 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.
> 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, roughly 12% of all Linux kernel contributions are signed off by Meta + Meta is the 5th biggest contributor to Linux kernel.
Perhaps research a bit more before you make these ignorant comments.
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.
I have some respect for Meta Research for the good they did releasing Torch, FastText vectors, and the LLaMa models among others for free.
How does this work fits with their mission of destroying the fabric of society and the mental well-being of teenagers, I cannot explain.
It's like the best of the best mechanical and electrical engineers have teamed up to build the world's most efficient orphan crushing machine. It sips power, runs cool, requires almost no maintenance, and pulverizes orphans into dense little cubes for easy clean up.
> 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.
Also it has a glorious viewing gallery to watch and listen to a thousand doomed orphans get fed to Zuckerberg’s ego so it can illuminate the path to total enshittification.
You've got to justify such a silly comparison.
Agreed, it takes a lot more power and doesn't run nearly as cool as all that.
Similar to how Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, etc. used tiny fractions of their wealth, on things that would bolster the opinions of the public. They’re laudable, but become less so when you see the bigger picture. Those free software tools are things that Meta needs for its own operations, and their moat is so vast that they can give them away for free and benefit from public participation.
ZSTD as well.
> 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.
wasn't LLaMa only open source because it had already leaked anyways? And they wanted to spin it in a positive light for their stakeholders.
It opened the floodgates, though. It was a real paradigm shift. After LLaMa, everybody saw that you could release large open models without any negative repercussions, and DeepSeek et al. hopped aboard the wagon. LLaMa was the first popular model that was truly open to the global public.
Meta earned a ton of goodwill by doing this -- it was very brave, and very influential. In my eyes, it outweighs everything negative they've ever done.
Let's stop saying that open weight models are open source. They are just a software that you can run on your own hardware (if you have a ton of money to spend to get it anyway) but they are not open, they are as open as any proprietary software that you can run on your PC is.
You can't study them, you can't modify them, you can't improve them, you can't look into how they are built etc.
> it was very brave, and very influential. In my eyes, it outweighs everything negative they've ever done.
Are you being sarcastic? Please let it be that you’re being sarcastic.
> I have some respect ... I cannot explain.
Naturally, they do it to earn "some respect" from those who otherwise see them clearly.
First of all, i don’t know why you are talking about engineers. This is a business decision, not an engineering one.
> I seriously can’t understand why there’s so much respect for anyone that works at Meta.
Is there? Thats new for me.
> yet they’re being praised for being the example of best engineers
Are they? I associate meta with the “move fast and break things” philosophy, not engineering excelence.
I’m sure there are some fine engineers there. But by and large it is just a big company with questionable ethics and lots of money.
> These people have arguably contributed nothing to society for over a decade
Not as FB. But they have shipped a lot of useful stuff. That doesn't mean the company is suddenly great and all should be forgiven but there is some nuance here.
In addition to all of their open source contributions, their ability to pay a ton of money and fun problems to solve led a lot of fantastic engineers to want to work there — especially before 2015.
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.
> 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.
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.
The salaries aren't based on contribution to society, they are based on contribution to Meta. Fat salaries come from fat contributions.
In a weird way, I'm kind of glad that they're ruining facebook.com.
Like, even in its heyday, it was such an attention trap, and it had very negative effects on the people who got addicted (especially teens).
But the site has gotten so much worse in the past couple years, and its brand is in the garbage. Maybe that's all for the best -- it was never really worth preserving.
The issue is that small business still utilize them instead of paying for and maintaining a web site. Want to know our business ours, events, or when we close early ... facebook.
There needs to be an easy to use low-cost, possible also advertisement driven, alternative that business can latch to so more can leave facebook.
I actively refuse to support Meta and block all their domain names in case of clicking on a tiny URL that sends me to their site. It also helps block their analytics used by 3rd parties. I will forever be a sunk cost for them.
> These people have arguably contributed nothing to society for over a decade […] they’re being praised for being the example of best engineers.
React? We can all criticize it, but it has revolutionized the web. Llama. Did you forget what sparked the whole open-weight wave? It was that. I dislike Meta, but I would not criticize the engineers competence. They have done impressive things, check out their blog if you genuinely are curious.
React ruined the web, and the mobile development too.
Now to load a simple website that in the past was a few kB of HTML, CSS and JS you need to download Mb of JS code. Now the browser needs to use Mb of RAM just to display a stupid webpage.
For what? It was better when we had PHP pages that did produce HTML on the server side.
Another thing to me that we have to get Meta discredit for, not something good in any way.
The web was broken long before React came along. Or have you forgotten about Angular, incompatibilities between JS engines that required hacks like jQuery, the Internet Explorer monopoly, and those who gave up on the stagnating specifications from w3c entirely so wrote their sites in Flash?
> revolutionized the web
Personally I hate what react has done to the web.
what is react responsible for? If you're referring to the explosion of SPAs, I think you should direct your blame to angularjs... React was just a better version of that revolution.
Agreed. React, imo, was a much better Backbone.js. Relatively lightweight primitives, composition, and JSX made building frontend applications fun without having to wire up everything by hand.
Did the makers of anuglarjs also have a conflict of interest? Or did they ruin the web just for the love of the game?
Angular would've done the same thing but more poorly
For how unoriginal, unreactive, and 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
Rich Harris: Rethinking Reactivity:
https://svelte.dev/blog/svelte-3-rethinking-reactivity
>There are some important technical differences (as I explain in the video above, React is not reactive) but conceptually it’s the same thing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdNJ3fydeao
React was over a decade ago.
React is kinda shit.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
There are tons of sex workers that rake in money that even FAANG engineers will never see in 10 lives (e.g OF 'models'). I doubt much of society has any respect for them though.
I've heard that millions of girls wanting to get rich look up to those "OF models" as role models.
Pretty much in the same way that a significant number of people in tech who wants a good paying job looks up to people working for Zuckerberg.
I dont think OF models are some paragon of virtue but theyre leagues ahead of engineers who choose to work at Meta
I agree, what I'm arguing is that money != respect as the parent asserted.
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.
thank you for saying this. We have to bring back shaming in tech.
PyTorch .. React ..
That two libraries already build Frontend and AI.
There is nothing special about the engineering behind React. Success simply compounds, if big company X does something everyone else must do it, which leads to more contributors, which leads to more visibility.
Even being the creators of React still wasn't enough to fix their shitshow of a website with a bazillion anti-patterns and the worse, most annoying UX of all time.
And yes, I mean facebook.com
> 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.
React, React Native, Ollama,...
How come they haven't contributed anything to society, so many developer jobs based on pushing that stuff all over the place. /s
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.
In the 2010s, there was a move away from files in the name of convenience (lock-in).
The 2020s are a war on hyperlinks. It is particularly unfortunate to see this masquerading as a concern for safety and security (“everything outside of our platform is scary and insecure”)
"War on hyperlinks"?
I get that Facebook is trying to make some $$$ on them here, but I wasn't aware we had any war (not even a "war on Christmas" fake war) going on against links.
I wonder if this is an effort to combat pages which post a short clickbait description and require you to click "read more" to see the full description, and often post the link in the comments. There are lots of sites (Polygon immediately comes to mind) which are notorious for doing this as a way to get fake engagement which boosts their posts which gets more clickbait engagement.
I know it's all speculation, and this does come across as more monetization creep, but I can't help to wonder if there's an underlying reason beyond "line go up".
I have a friend who is a best-selling author, and her threads account was being heavily throttled (hundreds of likes a few months ago, fewer than ten now) -- it was suggested that it's because she is posting links away from Meta properties, and the way around it was this "link in the comments" tactic.
So it's not necessarily clickbait -- seems to be also an evolved workaround to fight throttling. :-/
This is one thing that distinguishes Bluesky from other sites: they don't penalize you for linking outside the platform
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.
[delayed]
I didn't know this and kept sharing links on my new page and it was banned from posting.I tried to look for support but just received responses from bots all the time and no human review until I gave up. I ended up starting another page.
Presumably this is an A/B test? I don't see how that's remotely sustainable
Remember how Sears was a thing but they kept making dumb decisions and were also unable to adapt to new realities? Facebook/Meta is like that. Doomed company walking.
Sometimes I have thoughts like this, but then I get on the subway and watch everyone around me endlessly scroll Instagram while their brains melt out their ears, and then I decide that I was the one who was out of touch.
History tells us that a large portion of the population can be out of touch. Sometimes almost everybody in a given society.
One can hope.
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
Agreed, they are eating the seed corn with this one
LinkedIn has seriously deranked posts with links in the past. Everything within Meta is heavily A/B tested, but it seems feasible that this will become real.
Instagram already does charge for outgoing links, so I would assume that they found that they can sustainably make money with it there, and that it should work on FB too.
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.
Well, there should be someway to fund all the ai efforts. On the other hand, I am hoping this reduces the extremely polarizing posts that seem to fill fb these days.
It has been disincentivising links for quite some time, so more opinions and fluff, fewer quality posts and links to external materials.
Seems like an anti spam measure. Bad actors ruin all features where links can be placed in front of eyes.
I think this is far too charitable an interpretation. They could just ban spammers. Facebook doesn’t want links going off of their platform because they get paid for people staying on their platform and looking at ads.
Easier to harvest content for AI. Scraping the open internet is going to get more challenging.
archived facebook help page, no trackers: https://nonograph.com/about-links-in-organic-facebook-page-p...
source: https://www.facebook.com/help/1929252614431792
I love that they specified that links in ads do not count
Guess it's a tactic to go after bots and scammers?
It's a tactic, the only the latest of many, to go after people who use Facebook to communicate without paying for ads (that is to say - without paying current auction prices for the attention of the recipients of their messages.)
Surveillance capitalists have built a truly miserable internet.
I've been researching local newspapers, and the problems they face, lately, and one of them is that none of the social media sites allow them to get any visits from their followers because they either significantly de-rank posts with links off-site or it costs money to reach followers with links, or both. Of course Google scraping their sites and summarizing is another symptom of the same problem; FAANG wants all the revenue and a monopoly on what you see. Every penny every eyeball. None for small businesses, none for independent media, none for individuals.
I keep getting this feeling that we're in late-stage capitalism because of how all the oligarchs are maximizing extraction:
* Facebook with this and its new scraping rules for business accounts
* Turning Venezuela into a fiefdom
* Skydance merger
and on and on. But it's not late stage. It's just capitalism and we'll be reading about the same behavior 10 years from now.
Do they even know what H stands for in HTML?
What if i just post a QR code?
Is this not a good idea? It makes average users more selective about what content they are sharing, and reduces scam/bot content that can currently spam post links for free.
Facebook knows what you want to see, because you can follow pages and individuals. They choose to show those scam/bot posts to you anyway. This isn't to fight bots.
Facebook actively courted publishers so they'd post links to their content on their pages. Now they want to charge them for the privilege.
Very few spam/scam posts I see rely on external links. FB is an all in one scammers paradise. This just seems like a transparent attempt to keep people on platform.
This is for Facebook Pages, not for users. Average facebook daily user can keep posting 35 links a day to their favorite slop site.
Those 35 links to "you wouldn't believe which politician wants to kill our kids now" type posts are why I quit facebook. There is value in know what my friends are doing, but the negative value of that hate isn't worth it.
I wish there were a way to filter links and reshares out of my feed completely.
If it is for that reason and not a money squeezing/enshittification thing, it seems like a big admission their feed algorithm doesn't work.
So happy. All the fake news will cost much more now. Best case: less shit-links going around. Best case 2: Facebook closes down. No worst case.
Those free and open models though
Title isn’t fully accurate. This is specifically for business pages. You can still post links on your own profile or groups.
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.
Perhaps share QR codes with links. :)
Yep, it will basically mean the death of Facebook. I don’t use it much, but the groups I’m in are for sharing local events (usually link to library page, map for meetup location, etc). Without links, those groups go away.
Since links within Meta are free, maybe they are hoping you will bring all the external resources into some Meta property?
They just want kill small web and keep people on their platforms.
This is to get sites that monetize Facebook as a funnel to pay.
Genuinely, I think having a postal code based swap system run by post offices would be the ideal situation
You get both the safety of a public place to meet and identity verification through your post office representative
Seems like a win for everyone and we get FB out of the way
and postal money orders.
Rug pull!!!! I love it
This is a bi-directional play. For the vast majority that dont, this is an attempt to get more content INSIDE the facebook ecosystem as a moat, and for those that need outside content links they will pay since its a organic premium conversion.
Not defending it, just explaining the logic and why it might work even if it seems superficially stupid.
Simply insane. But honestly if anyone is using Facebook still that's on them. I can't fathom how people still use it.
I suffer using it because many people jumped ship from Craigslist to Facebook Marketplace.
Good deals and things can still certainly be found on Craigslist, and there seems to have been a rebound lately in use, but for a while there all that was left on Craigslist was old timers and resellers.
In think in the future, they will charge users for posting anything more than x times a months.
Generating slop content is cheap now, but you need to store it and very few people will see it, so you can't show more ads.
I hate to devil's advocate this. But is the observed behavior of 'is this an outgoing link' the only practical way to defend against external bot advertising campaigns? Aside from Facebook obviously wanting you to pay them for advertising, how does any independent forum deal with this at scale without banning links?
"how does any independent forum deal with this at scale without banning links?"
By banning spammers and scammers. Facebook opts not to ban scammers, as it's a significant portion of their revenue, and the latest AI slop is very good for engagement.
This is last stage capitalism of these tech platforms.
Nothing much left to innovate.
They are in the squeezing what's left position for that platform. Young kids think of facebook like we think of myspace. Social media as a platform in fact may just be over. my kids don't really use social media, they use whatsapp/iphone groups.
in fact... maybe kids think of instagram as a boomer unc platform now too.
While it's been longer-lasting than many, social media is a fad and all fads eventually decline. Fundamentally it doesn't do anything that can't be done in a group chat. Thanks to the "forever memory" of the internet, people have learned the risks of posting anything where it will be scraped and preserved for eternity, ready to haunt you when it's most awkward.
World Wide Web, huh?
Those hyperlinks ain't free, you know.
Of course they’re not free for Meta, as they allow people to access other sites than Facebook.
> World Wide Web
Embrace, extend, extinguish
They need to introduce postage for messages.
late 2025: Facebook tests £9.99 monthly subscription for sharing more than two links https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46314668
Can we just stop using Facebook as a defacto business/organizational page? come on people. I've been login-gated from what should be public pages for the better part of a decade now.
On Google's Youtube to post links (like in video descriptions, etc) you have to pay by adding sellable/monetarily valuable personally identifying information to your account like a phone number and ID. Otherwise even with a google account from 2006 in good standing you can't post links anymore. Attempts to edit old video descriptions with HTTP/S links (from before the policy) also don't work.
I'm not sure a phone number is particularly valuable. It is a decent way pretty much ensure that you aren't a bot, though.