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121–130 of 318 posts

Re: undefined

#121
post #37

Very disappointing. Hopefully some enterprising ransomware gang can do the world a service and encrypt all of FB's data for them, possibly upgrade all of their servers and backups to being /dev/null hosts entirely. A man can dream.

The way to destroy Facebook and the likes of it, is not by encrypting all of its data or even parts of it or sending it to /dev/null. The best attack would be in fact to display war footage from Syria, the Collateral Damage video and such gore to random people at random times, instead of ads perhaps. And to the other side who wouldnt mind the violence and gore, show them pornhub clips.

That wouldn't destroy it, that'd just turn it into 4chan!

Re: undefined

#122

And HackerNews seems to be much faster as soon as FB is back up. Not sure if this is just me.

Same.... was it a global DNS issue or was HN overloaded from everybody looking for updates?

From a cloudflare blog post on this, their public DNS resolvers were getting 30x their usual traffic. Presumably that was the case for DNS resolvers everywhere, so that would explain a slowdown:

> But that's not all. Now human behavior and application logic kicks in and causes another exponential effect. A tsunami of additional DNS traffic follows.

> This happened in part because apps won't accept an error for an answer and start retrying, sometimes aggressively, and in part because end-users also won't take an error for an answer and start reloading the pages, or killing and relaunching their apps, sometimes also aggressively.

... > So now, because Facebook and their sites are so big, we have DNS resolvers worldwide handling 30x more queries than usual and potentially causing latency and timeout issues to other platforms.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/october-2021-facebook-outage/

Edit: Although looking at the graph on that page, it appears that only DNS requests for FB properties increased 30x, so that last sentence appears to be misleading. Regardless, a significant overall increase.

Re: undefined

#123
post #103

During the time Facebook (and related properties) have been unavailable, I can't help but feel a little better about the world. There is so much hate, arguments, misinformation, angry, and harmful messaging on FB platforms. It's nice to know all of that crap is just....gone. At least for a little while.

It's interesting how Facebook experiences differ. To me it's a peaceful place showing mundane updates from friends and family, with zero politics. Plus, a bunch of niche hobby groups I subscribed, full of very kind and constructive people. The actual war zone to me is Twitter, not Facebook. I should add that I'm not from the US.

I suspect the original poster was not complaining about these topics showing up on their timeline; they don't want them showing up on anyone's timeline.

Re: undefined

#124

And HackerNews seems to be much faster as soon as FB is back up. Not sure if this is just me.

Probably Facebook trackers. I noticed a lot of apps (including my own) having major slowness on initial load while they were down. My assumption is it was their tracking code timing out.

It was probably due to the global DNS system being overloaded due to people and apps repeatedly retrying facebook connections. Cloudflare reported 30x normal DNS requests for FB properties.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/october-2021-facebook-outage/

Re: undefined

#125

During the time Facebook (and related properties) have been unavailable, I can't help but feel a little better about the world. There is so much hate, arguments, misinformation, angry, and harmful messaging on FB platforms. It's nice to know all of that crap is just....gone. At least for a little while.

It does feel nice, like the oppressor has died, at least for a bit. Also fun to watch the scramble to get it back online, would be nice if it never came back :)

How did it oppress you? Can you point to the place on the doll where it hurt you?

Re: undefined

#126
post #36

I'm seeing an unusual amount of reddit style small comments on this outage, which I find strange. They're short and in the vein of "Facebook is down: good" or "Facebook is back up: damn nothing good lasts forever" I understand the distain for Facebook as a business, but still this is pretty low effort.

Maybe it's because Facebook has become more than a business and has wormed its way into places where it has no business being? A ton of small city governments in the US do announcements and such on Facebook these days. One columnist is advocating giving the a seats at the United Nations, and does not get immediately laughed out of the room by the editor [1]. It's really hard to practically escape their reach, all the…

And how simple it actually was, just turn off the sites. Like a giant global, societal parental control setting.

Here I thought that this snake had wrapped itself entirely around all of us, but it really didn’t. All we have to do is ‘flick’, turn it off. Body image issues on Insta? Not today kids.

How simple some of our biggest problems are to solve. It does make one hopeful.

Re: undefined

#127

During the time Facebook (and related properties) have been unavailable, I can't help but feel a little better about the world. There is so much hate, arguments, misinformation, angry, and harmful messaging on FB platforms. It's nice to know all of that crap is just....gone. At least for a little while.

Facebook is very far from perfect, but it brings a lot of good to the world as well. I met my partner of almost five years thanks to Facebook's friend recommendation algorithms. I had never met them outside of Facebook and we didn't have any friends in common outside Facebook either. In fact, when we met, we lived on opposite coasts. I will always be grateful to Zuck & Co. for that, and for the hundreds of other frie…

I think the question is, how do you keep the good and get rid of the bad? I think there's a lot of great things that social media has done to connect people, but all too often it's only a shallow or artificial connection. I think the other problem is that social media will make you find people "like" you. Humans have always sought that out, but there was always some variance that allowed us to remember that others unlike us were still human. Now, with connections possible the world over, we ironically are more likely to only interact with individuals that share our opinions because it's a lot easier to find people like that when you can search the entire world for it. That leads to otherization of any who doesn't share that opinion. So, how do we create social media that keeps that potential for connection you are talking about, but does it in a meaningful way where individuals are exposed to more than an echo chamber?

Re: undefined

#128

During the time Facebook (and related properties) have been unavailable, I can't help but feel a little better about the world. There is so much hate, arguments, misinformation, angry, and harmful messaging on FB platforms. It's nice to know all of that crap is just....gone. At least for a little while.

Facebook is very far from perfect, but it brings a lot of good to the world as well. I met my partner of almost five years thanks to Facebook's friend recommendation algorithms. I had never met them outside of Facebook and we didn't have any friends in common outside Facebook either. In fact, when we met, we lived on opposite coasts. I will always be grateful to Zuck & Co. for that, and for the hundreds of other frie…

facebook drove your other options to suicide

Re: undefined

#129

During the time Facebook (and related properties) have been unavailable, I can't help but feel a little better about the world. There is so much hate, arguments, misinformation, angry, and harmful messaging on FB platforms. It's nice to know all of that crap is just....gone. At least for a little while.

I feel like we're singling out FB here. Can we bundle Twitter and Tiktok with it? May be Youtube comments? The danger of course is that we have all piled up on a scape goat and the rest of the social media companies will continue to enjoy great PR. Tiktok continues to be HN's darling. Edit: Downvotes really? What for?

Television is a new medium where opinions are neither rare nor well done. (~~Anonymous from the 1930s, with many varieties)

It helps to remember that most new mediums follow the same trend: when its easier to share opinions, everyone is flabbergasted at the huge volume of "low quality" opinions.

Re: undefined

#130
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the oppressor It’s a website that shows you what your friends are doing. That’s it. People said the same things about television

That’s simplifying it a lot.

There has been tons of use for it for hate, but people have found a way to use every method of communication for hate (e.g. TV, Mail, phones) and efforts to crack down on hate on Facebook haven’t seemed to have an effect on hate in the real world (see the people banned from Facebook who went on to use other platforms to coordinate 1/6). I don’t like their privacy intrusions but people seem to have a tendency to blame all of society’s ills on Facebook, phones, and the internet and that in and of itself is a massive oversimplification that doesn’t reflect the real issues with our society
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