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Facebook has blocked Dreamwidth

andrewducker.dreamwidth.org

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Re: Facebook has blocked Dreamwidth

#131

Post by duskwuff »

_ps6d wrote: post #116
zorkian wrote: post #102

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…

Hmm, maybe it comes in waves? I just read over the last hour or so of posts on /latest/ and most of the posts there looked legitimate.

Re: Facebook has blocked Dreamwidth

#132

Post by rocqua »

kps wrote: post #103
driverdan wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About what? FB can block anyone they want for any reason they want.

About abusing its monopoly power to prevent users from linking to a competitor.

Interestingly, if FB censors some one/thing that isn't a direct competitor, that means anti-trust doesn't apply. At the same time, the problem of a forum essential to public discourse censoring speech persists. Even worse there is very little appeal possible against the censoring.

So, whilst anti-trust might help sometimes. It is not the best tool here. What we need is legislation.

Re: Facebook has blocked Dreamwidth

#133

Post by duskwuff »

meristem wrote: post #97
missblit wrote: post #93

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.

Initial migration: LiveJournal was purchased by a Russian company. Users did not believe their data would be safe.

And a massive leak of plaintext (!) passwords last year [1] would indicate that users were correct.

[1]: https://www.zdnet.com/article/26-million-livejournal-credent...

Re: Facebook has blocked Dreamwidth

#134

Post by chrisoverzero »

zorkian wrote: post #102

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…

It’s really great to see how far Dreamwidth has come since the start.

Re: Facebook has blocked Dreamwidth

#135

Post by paulie_a »

mindslight wrote: post #120
_ps6d wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sites have zero responsibility to monitor for spam. Other sites have no obligation to link to them.

And that is what we are talking about. An obligation to link others

Re: Facebook has blocked Dreamwidth

#136

Post by strstr »

wcerfgba wrote: post #19

I was not aware that Facebook blocked users from posting links to specific domains. Is the list made public anywhere?

This is typically used for anti-spam/anti-malware. FB has a lot of automation to try to stop obviously malicious content. Just, sometimes, it hits things that aren't malicious. I'm most familiar with the malicious links that, when you click them, cause you to spam your friends with the same link.

People don't notice this automation exists, except when it doesn't work. Then they either complain "Why didn't XYZ get caught! This is obviously spam! I could write better automation." or "OMG they banned dreamwidth!".

It's possible they extended this (or something similar) to filter out sites with hate speech/"community guideline violations". And in that case some sub-domain of dreamwidth posted something horrible. And then the automation slammed the hammer on the whole domain.

Re: Facebook has blocked Dreamwidth

#137

Post by zaptrem »

rocqua wrote: post #129
jimnotgym wrote: post #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.

How about federating censorship (/curation). That is, anyone can pick who gets to censor / curate their stream. And Facebook just provides the platform. Maybe, for legally required censorship, the platform can still take action. But for anything else, let people pick their censor.

Then Facebook quickly becomes a platform of super-bubbles, and their influence on humanity becomes 100X worse over night. Content management policies exist because sometimes the creators of these platforms don't like them being used for evil.

Re: Facebook has blocked Dreamwidth

#138

Post by mindways »

andybak wrote: post #10
AndrewDucker wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it's an actually good blogging site. Main thing it has against it is the lack of an app. (And that Facebook has just blocked it)

> Main thing it has against it is the lack of an app. Curious about why? I rarely use apps if there's a web page available that doesn't suck. This looks more like "Main thing it has against it is the website predates responsive, mobile friendly web design" EDIT - actually aside from a few glitches it's not awful on mobile - and a random community I tried seemed to work fairly well.

I glanced at their latest code push a few days back, and some of the bugfixes/updates were related to presentation on mobile, so it's definitely something they're paying attention to and improving over time. (They're not blazing-fast, since the ratio of codebase-size to programmer-time is high, but they're persistent.)

Re: Facebook has blocked Dreamwidth

#139

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

scarface74 wrote: post #82
searchableguy wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Enforcement offline is hard to scale and limited even for china. You don’t have to tell 1 billion people in China not to say F%%% China”. You just punish a few and the rest fall in line. Once you punish a few, the rest self censor.

Imagine if Facebook or Google started doing this.

"Oh, you're friends with someone who says X? Welp, you must be a Bad User and your posts will receive a lot less visibility and the validation that you desire. But if you were to stop interacting with your Bad Friend, you could become a Good User again."

And oops, "Bad Friend" no longer gets invited to real-life parties because most people still consider FB the most convenient way to organize them and people only rarely remember to forward the invites.

Re: Facebook has blocked Dreamwidth

#140

Post by AndrewDucker »

duskwuff wrote: post #131
_ps6d wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Hmm, maybe it comes in waves? I just read over the last hour or so of posts on /latest/ and most of the posts there looked legitimate.

Yeah, same. I can't tell with the Russian posts, but the ones in English were a mixture of journal updates and fanfic.
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