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

Facebook has blocked Dreamwidth

andrewducker.dreamwidth.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 196 posts

Re: Facebook has blocked Dreamwidth

#71

Post by wolfgke »

bzb3 wrote: post #34
easton wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say Apollo (or Reddit is Fun on Android) is a heck of a lot better than new Reddit, and about as good as old Reddit. And Google Maps' app beats their site by a county mile on iOS. There's no good Hacker News client for mobile though, at least one that's better than the web page. Not that I'm saying someone should make one either, the site is responsive as heck.

Apollo is a bad example since Reddit purposely sabotage their website so you use their app. It's perfectly possible to write a good Reddit web client; they chose not to

> It's perfectly possible to write a good Reddit web client; they chose not to

Good for whom? "Good for the user" does not mean "good for Reddit".

Re: Facebook has blocked Dreamwidth

#72

Post by scarface74 »

spacebear wrote: post #68
scarface74 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Protected Speech” means that the government can’t censor it, not private corporations.

In 2020, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Cloudflare are bigger gatekeepers of free speech than any government.

any government?

Tell that to people who live in China, N. Korea, or any country controlled by a theocracy.

Even in the US some states ban doctors from talking about abortion and/or force doctors to give women seeking an abortion false information.

Re: Facebook has blocked Dreamwidth

#73

Post by ldoughty »

Adding my own story to the article... I get where they are coming from...

I had to deal with the Facebook developer platform support recently, it was (still is) a nightmare... We only have 100 or so Facebook users, but dealing with their app approval process, review process, and repedative re-review process, has probably cost me 4 weeks of "maintenance" work in the last year to keep OAuth working for them.. And here's the best part: we request no additional scopes! We get first name, last name, email address, profile picture, the minimum to OAuth... No post read/write, no photo permissions (aside from profile picture), no friends access, nothing. We are literally the lowest risk app to end users that you can make on Facebook's platform...

They started a review on us a few weeks ago, we reported saying we needed more information (their wording was unclear)... They acknowledged the request for information, then a month later banned us without ever providing the information. We had an outage for Facebook users for 2-3 days while we waited for their support to read or appeal again asking for information. It's now been 7 weeks, and both requests for the same information has not been answered, I'm afraid they are going to ban us again in a week it two still not working with us...

Facebook is a nightmare to work with, we have no developers that actually want to keep working with them. It's offensive to most our developers that we have to link personal accounts to our work Facebook application.

Re: Facebook has blocked Dreamwidth

#74

Post by zajd »

spacebear wrote: post #68
scarface74 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Protected Speech” means that the government can’t censor it, not private corporations.

In 2020, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Cloudflare are bigger gatekeepers of free speech than any government.

There are better ways of fixing that than allowing nazism on Facebook

Re: Facebook has blocked Dreamwidth

#75

Post by luckylion »

paulgb wrote: post #33

This is why I'm so cynical about the Zuckerberg's stated stance on “free expression”. You can't go around positioning yourself as if you're the last bastion of free speech online[1] and then turn around and block large swathes of indie content because they are hosted on a particular domain. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/10/17/zuckerb...

Those are different things though. You can most likely write whatever you want to link to on Facebook, so they're not really censoring speech. They censor some off-platform links.

Re: Facebook has blocked Dreamwidth

#76

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

corywatilo wrote: post #51

The same thing happened to my domain name about a month ago. (I also posted about it here.) This is happening more and more frequently, and the fact they block entire domains rather than a specific subdomain is really poor design. I finally got it unblocked, but only thanks to a former colleague (engineer) who now works at Facebook. If that didn't work, my next step was going to be filing a lawsuit, just to try to ge…

It seems likely that what's happening here is some combination of:

1) Spammers using one domain and multiple sub-domains

2) A poorly calibrated ML model for spam.

It is worth noting that FB get probably the world's largest amount of spammers, fraudsters and general bad people due to the fact that they have an absurd amount of users.

Honestly, though, if this stays on HN it will get fixed, but it's deeply concerning that if this is happening a bunch of times (and it probably is) but those sites don't appear on HN, then this will not get fixed.

It's also possible that someone has weaponised the FB spam system against dreamwidth (which seems less likely to be me, to be fair).

Re: Facebook has blocked Dreamwidth

#77

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

donohoe wrote: post #20

If you use FB's url debugger it gives the message: "We can't review this website because the content doesn't meet our Community Standards. If you think this is a mistake, please let us know" So an unhelpful; start but a start to understanding what may have happened. Link: https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/?q=https%3A%2F%2... My guess is that FB should have blocked a sub-domain but instead blocked a whole do…

They probably have some threshold for rolling the block up to the domain, and dreamwidth hit it.

Alternatively, it was a fat-finger.

Re: Facebook has blocked Dreamwidth

#78

Post by spacebear »

scarface74 wrote: post #72
spacebear wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 2020, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Cloudflare are bigger gatekeepers of free speech than any government.

any government? Tell that to people who live in China, N. Korea, or any country controlled by a theocracy. Even in the US some states ban doctors from talking about abortion and/or force doctors to give women seeking an abortion false information.

Yes, any government when you account for overall reach. Just because some governments have censored more content to date, doesn’t mean they’re more powerful than the US tech monopolies.

If a link can’t be shared on Facebook, Google, or Twitter, it may as well not exist in most of the world.

Re: Facebook has blocked Dreamwidth

#79

Post by searchableguy »

scarface74 wrote: post #72
spacebear wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 2020, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Cloudflare are bigger gatekeepers of free speech than any government.

any government? Tell that to people who live in China, N. Korea, or any country controlled by a theocracy. Even in the US some states ban doctors from talking about abortion and/or force doctors to give women seeking an abortion false information.

China has 1.4 billion people.

Facebook has over 3 billion users.

Gmail has over 2 billion active users. All their products combined probably have more than 3 billion.

US has 350 million people.

By those numbers alone, aren't tech companies more powerful arbitrators?

But that's a bad metric. We should talk about enforcement rather than raw numbers. Government's interest and design won't allow it to censor expressions in the same way that private companies [0] do. Private companies can filter anything and since tech companies are digital, the enforcement itself can scale a lot more than government. Government maintains some sort of appeal system while tech companies don't have to.

Algorithms responsible for gmail filter billions of mails daily probably. Obviously, not all of it can be called censorship as majority of it is spam but anything wrongfully filtered is censorship, no? That's going to be a huge number that can't scale offline in enforcement.

0] https://theintercept.com/2020/03/16/tiktok-app-moderators-us...

[1]https://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/email-marketing/2019/05...

Re: Facebook has blocked Dreamwidth

#80

Post by zerocrates »

swiley wrote: post #64
donohoe wrote: post #20

If you use FB's url debugger it gives the message: "We can't review this website because the content doesn't meet our Community Standards. If you think this is a mistake, please let us know" So an unhelpful; start but a start to understanding what may have happened. Link: https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/?q=https%3A%2F%2... My guess is that FB should have blocked a sub-domain but instead blocked a whole do…

Why would you need a URL debugger? What’s to debug about a URL?

I believe that thing does stuff like making sure Facebook can access the link and checking OpenGraph tags and so on, so you can see how Facebook will "preview" links to your site if people post them.
Post reply on HN