Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Twitter’s deletion of its FB app caused old cross-posts to temporarily disappear

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 228 posts

Re: Twitter’s deletion of its FB app caused old cross-posts to temporarily disappear

#131

Post by StudentStuff »

monetus wrote: post #116
um_ya wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then people will have to come to terms that banning Alex Jones was a bad idea too. You can't support a companies right to ban people you don't like while simultaneously advocating protections as a utility.

Yes, universal access to the utility makes sense. But what would the utility be? Could FB possibly be nationalized? It's international at its core. If governments created a copycat, it could fragment social media by country, which seems bad. I like the protective intent, but barely have an idea of how it might be implemented.

Centralized social media isn't long for this world IMO, look at what is happening to Twitter (userbase erosion) & Reddit (people are flooding there from Facebook, hurting site quality). Meanwhile notable figures have moved on from both sites, in part due to bans or purely due to the degradation of their former social home.

Re: Twitter’s deletion of its FB app caused old cross-posts to temporarily disappear

#132

Post by greglindahl »

telltruth wrote: post #129
mabbo wrote: post #54

The problem here is the dichotomy of "ownership" in social media platforms. Facebook (and others) know that giving you that feeling of ownership and customization keeps you coming back. The Twitter Avatar, the Facebook profile, the MySpace page. All those posts on your profile add to your collection, your customization. They let you control that little bit so that you feel like you own it in some way. Did you love th…

Before everyone starts overreacting, please read the article first. There is no formal announcement from FB for this. Few users noticed their tweeted posts getting deleted and they suddenly arrived at conclusion that this is FB’s new policy. The article itself says this might be some bug that could have occurred due to recent API related changes. Having said that, I really hope this is not the new policy from FB. Not…

Even if it's "just a bug", it's not over-reacting to be horrified at the loss of content. Even if it gets restored, it's a wake-up call for who decides what gets kept and what doesn't.

Re: Twitter’s deletion of its FB app caused old cross-posts to temporarily disappear

#133

Post by joe_the_user »

jefftk wrote: post #82
joe_the_user wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd assume posts made with the API would exist still on Twitter.

The fb discussion threads those posts initiated are gone, though. If this happened to me I'd be extremely upset: I've had many very good discussions on Facebook that it would hurt to lose.

This is a point I hadn't considered.

Re: Twitter’s deletion of its FB app caused old cross-posts to temporarily disappear

#135

Post by nukemandan »

MBCook wrote: post #10
Alex3917 wrote: post #3

This is pretty crazy. For people whose job is social media, this is basically the equivalent of Github just arbitrarily deciding they're going to delete all of your startup's source code without telling anyone in advance, or like Google Docs just deciding to disappear all your spreadsheets. With only a couple months until election season, Facebook is now literally editing politician's pages and deleting the campaign…

No, it’s the equivalent of GitHub deciding to remove all the code that you automatically re-post from SourceForge. In what way, AT ALL, was this this feature good for FACEBOOK? It meant people could be “on” Facebook and “active” without ever actually logging in or using the app or engaging in any way. Why would they want to just be a dumping ground for copies of another social network’s posts? I guess I’m surprised t…

This is why we need federated social media. I can port all my data to any platform and keep a copy of my own. then when facebook does this, I can just jump to another platform with almost no friction. EG a git repo of all my data/post and linked media that I can move from github -> gitlab

Re: Twitter’s deletion of its FB app caused old cross-posts to temporarily disappear

#137

Post by dymk »

greglindahl wrote: post #132
telltruth wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before everyone starts overreacting, please read the article first. There is no formal announcement from FB for this. Few users noticed their tweeted posts getting deleted and they suddenly arrived at conclusion that this is FB’s new policy. The article itself says this might be some bug that could have occurred due to recent API related changes. Having said that, I really hope this is not the new policy from FB. Not…

Even if it's "just a bug", it's not over-reacting to be horrified at the loss of content. Even if it gets restored, it's a wake-up call for who decides what gets kept and what doesn't.

This thread is not just horror at the loss of content, it's FUD about the platform.

Had this happened to just about anyone else, the response would have been "whoops this obvious mistake really sucks!"

But it's Facebook, so HN's reaction is "wow fuck these guys for this clearly purposeful event!"

Re: Twitter’s deletion of its FB app caused old cross-posts to temporarily disappear

#138

Post by rspeer »

nukemandan wrote: post #135
MBCook wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it’s the equivalent of GitHub deciding to remove all the code that you automatically re-post from SourceForge. In what way, AT ALL, was this this feature good for FACEBOOK? It meant people could be “on” Facebook and “active” without ever actually logging in or using the app or engaging in any way. Why would they want to just be a dumping ground for copies of another social network’s posts? I guess I’m surprised t…

This is why we need federated social media. I can port all my data to any platform and keep a copy of my own. then when facebook does this, I can just jump to another platform with almost no friction. EG a git repo of all my data/post and linked media that I can move from github -> gitlab

Okay, but don't get the illusion that things like Mastodon currently let you port your identity and your data.

Moving from one Mastodon instance to another involves starting over from scratch, just as much as moving from Twitter to Mastodon does. Federated portability sounds like a nice goal and I hear that some people are working on it, but nobody really knows what form it will take.

Re: Twitter’s deletion of its FB app caused old cross-posts to temporarily disappear

#139

Post by TheAceOfHearts »

IIAOPSW wrote: post #121
monetus wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think about the idea of classifying social media as a utility? I've heard a lot of people mention that lately...

Water is a utility. Electricity is a utility. Gas is a utility. Roads are a utility. Social media is a utility? sm seems to fit out in terms of scale and importance. We don't need social media like we need roads. Call me a crotchety old guy but I think quite the opposite, we'd all be better off with less social media. No need to enshrine it with the status of "utility".

Telephones are considered utilities. Many think that internet service providers should be considered utilities as well.

I'm still uncertain where I stand on social media being a utility though; I'm not sure what that would imply.

Re: Twitter’s deletion of its FB app caused old cross-posts to temporarily disappear

#140

Post by adventured »

nukemandan wrote: post #130
mabbo wrote: post #54

The problem here is the dichotomy of "ownership" in social media platforms. Facebook (and others) know that giving you that feeling of ownership and customization keeps you coming back. The Twitter Avatar, the Facebook profile, the MySpace page. All those posts on your profile add to your collection, your customization. They let you control that little bit so that you feel like you own it in some way. Did you love th…

Thee need to own your own data is clear - only you should have the right to redact your posts for any reason. We should adopt systems that are fundamentally amoral, non-censoring, and non-competitive for our data being on their platform. Systems where we can profit from the success of our content. Can anyone think of some examples?

The average Facebook user would receive $10 per year if they were to distribute all of their annual profit to the userbase. That's the best case scenario. What's the point?

So users can profit from their content? They won't profit from their content, it's nearly worthless per unit. It's only in the vast total sum that there is any value, and only because it's held by one entity. If you distribute it per post or per person, it's very close to meaningless. $20 billion is a lot per year to one entity; $20 billion per year to two billion people, is not.

If you were generous with Twitter and assumed they can generate $400m per year in profit and then chose to distribute that to the userbase, you're talking about ~$1.30 per active user per year. If you tilt the value distribution toward the most active, famous users (whose tweets are far more valuable in regards to monetization), then you're just destroying the distribution premise to begin with by concentrating the wealth in a slightly different manner: Taylor Swift doesn't need to worry about earning $35,000 per year from her tweets, and Joe Smith getting $7 from Twitter for their 1,278 economically worthless posts also does not matter.

Ultimately you just end up with a YouTube outcome if you value tilt. A small group of rich users earning millions of dollars on FB or Twitter, and everybody else entirely failing to earn even minimum wage for the time put into their economically low value posts. How does that really change the equation vs the people that are capturing most of the value today? Taylor Swift can already capture the value generated by Twitter and Facebook, she can buy the stock.

Post reply on HN