I'm really thankful I haven't yet had a job where all I'm developing is new ways to force people to see ads. Imagine working on a 'feature' like this for weeks or months, and the end result is simply that people who don't want to see ads now have to see ads.
Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline
11–20 of 367 posts
Re: Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline
#12Anyone who has written a few scrappers knows how brutally ineffective this is. Yelp tried to pull the same thing and it took me about 3 minutes to rectify my "for fun" scraper. It's also really not that difficult to write a smart scraper that you say, "Look for these things in this post. However you find them, replicate it for the others". Which is ultimately what I made my Yelp scraper do.
If there's a pattern, I will find it, and I will exploit it. <3
Re: Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline
#13Wonder if this breaks screen readers and if someone could go after facebook for accessibility violations in the EU where public protections are strong.
I just tested it, it does not.
Most of the nonsense is "Display: None" so screen readers ignore it entirely. These elements seem to exist to stop simplistic HTML element matching, screen readers obey CSS.
Re: Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline
#14All we need is for the EU to pass a law that says paid content must be clearly laid out in the HTML not just final presentation.
Re: Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline
#15Does this meet the required standard for accessibility users? Do they have any such obligations?
Re: Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline
#16Does this meet the required standard for accessibility users? Do they have any such obligations?
No one cares about accessibility when ad dollars are at stake.
Re: Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline
#17Anyone who has written a few scrappers knows how brutally ineffective this is. Yelp tried to pull the same thing and it took me about 3 minutes to rectify my "for fun" scraper. It's also really not that difficult to write a smart scraper that you say, "Look for these things in this post. However you find them, replicate it for the others". Which is ultimately what I made my Yelp scraper do. If there's a pattern, I wi…
Yep, seems like a total waste of time. The people scraping will spend the necessary time to get around this (and then distribute that knowledge to the masses) so it seems like a pointless arms race. Facebook employees could better use their time on developing actual features that bring value.
Re: Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline
#18If you don't mind getting rid of every post in the timeline, there's News Feed Eradicator for Facebook:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicat...
Re: Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline
#19I'm really thankful I haven't yet had a job where all I'm developing is new ways to force people to see ads. Imagine working on a 'feature' like this for weeks or months, and the end result is simply that people who don't want to see ads now have to see ads.
There are worse jobs at Facebook....
https://www.revealnews.org/article/facebook-knowingly-duped-...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19002596
Imagine being part of the gaggle of fuckheads who decided to not implement simple preventative measures that made it harder for children to accidentally spend thousands of dollars in manipulative games.
Or their peers who who helped strategize more effective tricks for game developers to use so children would be more likely to need a multi-thousand dollar refund Facebook could refuse.
Re: Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline
#20meanwhile https://text.npr.org/
ps: thanks for the comments below, I was curious about similar websites