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Facebook has blocked Dreamwidth

andrewducker.dreamwidth.org

111–120 of 196 posts

Re: Facebook has blocked Dreamwidth

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anything dreamwidth is closer to livejournal. Livejournal predates tubmlr by years and years, but there was a migration from livejournal to dreamwidth for reasons I don't fully remember.

there was a migration from livejournal to dreamwidth for reasons I don't fully remember Livejournal became associated with CP thinly disguised as fanfic. Think Snape and an underage Harry Potter kind of stuff. It was sold to the Russians after its value imploded because all the English-speaking normal users left. The Russian content on there now is as far as I know innocuous; that kind of fanfic is mainly a Western t…

I find it weird that drawn child porn is illegal actually. It's as if drawing murder or rape would be illegal.

Don't get me wrong, I understand 100% the people that find the idea repulsive, would never want to accidentally see it, etc. But that's the same with gore / gruesome scenes: I really don't want to see that, either. That's not what makes something illegal.

It might also depend on research into whether it makes pedophiles more likely to act on their feelings. If it's shown that pedophiles viewing drawn child porn has adverse effects, it should indeed not be allowed; but I never read about it having such an effect. So far as I know it doesn't hurt anyone.

Re: Facebook has blocked Dreamwidth

#112

Hi all! Co-owner of Dreamwidth here. Pretty cool to see my project hit the front page of HN, but definitely a bit of a /shrug moment on the subject itself. "Facebook gonna Facebook" I think is approximately how we feel about this. I know here on HN we're used to hearing stories about scrappy startups trying to carve a piece of the pie big enough to exit on, but that is pretty much the exact opposite of what Dreamwidt…

Great to hear all around. I like the focus on doing your own thing and ignoring the other platforms (and likely naysayers). We could all use a healthy dose of this in our side projects! Also - I would take it as a positive you are blocked on FB.

My wife and I tried to setup a simple business page for our local store we opened less than a year ago; they flag us as a fake/fraudulent account multiple times when we tried to created one; neither of us have personal/active FB accounts so I guess that's the reason (and this behaivor, yeah makes me double down on NEVER getting a FB account now). I even tried to emailed them 'proof' as they requested because my wife was worried it would really hurt us, nothing ever came of it. We finally decided it wasn't worth our effort, forgot about them and our store has thrived since. I'm happy to grow our business without having to deal with them. We've been using local and other ad platforms such as NextDoor.com, which I'd never heard of but one of our older customers brought to our attention. People talk about getting rid of Facebook, to me it starts with the actions you guys take and how my wife and I are going about it.

Don't support Facebook at all, they don't deserve it.

Re: Facebook has blocked Dreamwidth

#113

Hi all! Co-owner of Dreamwidth here. Pretty cool to see my project hit the front page of HN, but definitely a bit of a /shrug moment on the subject itself. "Facebook gonna Facebook" I think is approximately how we feel about this. I know here on HN we're used to hearing stories about scrappy startups trying to carve a piece of the pie big enough to exit on, but that is pretty much the exact opposite of what Dreamwidt…

I really like the product you've made, and use it regularly. It might be helpful for your user base, and the project as a whole if one responded with a little more than a shrug. Facebook may be more willing to listen to you if you contact them then random users in getting this resolved.

Re: Facebook has blocked Dreamwidth

#114
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it causes them more trouble than it's worth it's understandable. Someone else pointed out that there was a lot of questionable sexual content on the site and you can't really expect Facebook to micromanage every subdomain.

I don't see why Facebook needs to censor "questionable" sexual content. Individual users and groups have adequate tools to control what they themselves see. The only point of Facebook's censorship is to control what the willing can see.

because asking the average user to fine tune their experience to avoid questionable sexual content is going to piss a ton of users off who expect this to be the default experience on the site. So Facebook does a calculation and the result is that removing that stuff is easier than having a million people complain about being exposed to it and that's that.

The same reason any other forum or platform moderates their content and usually removes sexual content, you want the default experience to be good for the average user on the site.

Re: Facebook has blocked Dreamwidth

#115

Dreamwidth is a blogging site, an offshoot of Livejournal, I would expect content on it to be across the full spectrum of both opinions and quality. Banning it as a domain makes about as much sense as banning Wordpress or Blogspot.

Facebook has banned Wordpress' autocrossposter for years, nobody following me on Facebook ever sees any of my posts any more because I just cannot be bothered to manually cut and paste an excerpt and link to my WP-based site.

Facebook banned automated posting to personal accounts a year or so ago.

You can still manually post links to any site that isn't banned though.

Re: Facebook has blocked Dreamwidth

#116

Hi all! Co-owner of Dreamwidth here. Pretty cool to see my project hit the front page of HN, but definitely a bit of a /shrug moment on the subject itself. "Facebook gonna Facebook" I think is approximately how we feel about this. I know here on HN we're used to hearing stories about scrappy startups trying to carve a piece of the pie big enough to exit on, but that is pretty much the exact opposite of what Dreamwidt…

This might come off as a little rude, but it's sincere advice from someone who used to work in anti-spam (not at Facebook):

I had a quick look through Dreamwidth's "latest" page (https://www.dreamwidth.org/latest) earlier today, and a major portion of the posts on there were blatant spam for things like credit card scams, "Work from home and make $1000/day!", and so on.

You seem to be hosting a lot of spam, and those spam posts are also far more likely to be getting linked externally on sites like Facebook, since that's the reason they're being created.

Because Dreamwidth is effectively free website hosting along with a free new subdomain for each account, blocking individual subdomains is futile, and it's difficult for external sites to distinguish between spam and legitimate blogs.

I'm sure Facebook will unblock you fairly soon, but unless you get the spam on Dreamwidth under control, this will probably happen fairly often with different sites blocking it. It would be easy to end up with an impression of Dreamwidth being a spam-hosting site, and decide to block it (either manually or automatically).

Blogspot has always been in a similar situation and would get blocked from a lot of sites due to the sheer amount of spam it hosts.

Re: Facebook has blocked Dreamwidth

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN works fine on mobile I think the only improvement needed might be a different style on "code" blocks, but otherwise it works great There's literally no need for an app

HN has been a really bad experience on mobile for me. It's really difficult to tap links accurately. In particular collapsing and expanding comment threads is super annoying. I've been using Hews from the Play store instead.

Zoom then click. Works like a charm.

A bit kludgy, but still a much better user interface than any other discussion board I've used lately.

Re: Facebook has blocked Dreamwidth

#118
If you want to be the centre of the world, if you want to be a public utility, if you want to be the front page of the internet... then you have to have a proper complaints procedure, a proper independent appeals process. Yes it would be very expensive, tough luck.

Re: Facebook has blocked Dreamwidth

#119
post #96

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…

> The best resolution may be through Ads billing, by trying to post an ad and reporting a problem displaying an ad Something kind of like that worked at the job I a few years ago. A large provider of free email that also runs an ad network (not Google or Microsoft) once kept flagging my employer's emails as spam. The only emails we sent were receipts to people who had purchased stuff from us, an email with installati…

That sounds just like the (very generous interpretation of) Yelp business model. Automated systems that are as effective as elevator door close buttons, & human support available only to paying customers.

I think the origin of this wasn't even originally sinister. It's just that "free" services aren't willing to provide human support, so youtube, gmail, etc. rely on automated systems. Ultimately, only paying customers get human support, and that simple system (even assuming all actors behave well) progressively skews to the advantage of paying customers. The house edge is small, but cumulative.

Re: Facebook has blocked Dreamwidth

#120
post #116

Hi all! Co-owner of Dreamwidth here. Pretty cool to see my project hit the front page of HN, but definitely a bit of a /shrug moment on the subject itself. "Facebook gonna Facebook" I think is approximately how we feel about this. I know here on HN we're used to hearing stories about scrappy startups trying to carve a piece of the pie big enough to exit on, but that is pretty much the exact opposite of what Dreamwidt…

This might come off as a little rude, but it's sincere advice from someone who used to work in anti-spam (not at Facebook): I had a quick look through Dreamwidth's "latest" page ( https://www.dreamwidth.org/latest ) earlier today, and a major portion of the posts on there were blatant spam for things like credit card scams, "Work from home and make $1000/day!", and so on. You seem to be hosting a lot of spam, and tho…

Controlling spam used to be about stopping unwanted messages sent to users. Now it has morphed into this idea that every site has the responsibility of content-policing their own users, lest what they publish be used to facilitate spam. Your advice may be pragmatic, but it shows how far we've slid down the slippery slope.
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