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Tell HN: Facebook is blocking the publiccode.eu open letter initiative as spam

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Re: Tell HN: Facebook is blocking the publiccode.eu open letter initiative as spam

#41

Post by pmlnr »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #37

On the contrary, it's not even slightly difficult to believe that this is not deliberate because it happens all the time . Not everything has to be a mad conspiracy. It's roughly one billion times easier to believe that a bad automated flagging system has triggered and marked this particular link as spam, than it is to believe that someone at Facebook is twirling their moustache, stroking their long-haired white cat,…

> Facebook's automated moderation systems are famously shit.

Unlike Tumblr's NSFW filter, which is always correct /s

Read: ALL automated systems are bad, the whole AI thing is a joke, and will still be for a long time.

Re: Tell HN: Facebook is blocking the publiccode.eu open letter initiative as spam

#42

Post by liftm »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #20
JimmyAxod wrote: post #4

.eu isn’t the most legitimate looking domain. They probably just have some rules around which domains tend to be spam/scam/bs

Does it matter if a domain LOOKS legitimate? I mean .com doesn't look legitimate anymore either because of the amount of bad websites on there.

Depends, I guess? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28554400

Re: Tell HN: Facebook is blocking the publiccode.eu open letter initiative as spam

#43

Post by Aeolun »

danschumann wrote: post #38

With so many large "crime waves", these small ripples which seem like crimes... Are they? Is MZ(read: Mark Zuckerberg) next to AC(read: Al Capone)? Does he still, in his heart of hearts, refer to his users as "stupid *f's"(as he referred to them in 2000's for "trusting" him. Nothing changed to make his users any smarter, so getting caught openly admitting how he feels did not change his opinion on his users, merely c…

Does anyone here not consider Facebook users “stupid f*’s” for trusting him?

Re: Tell HN: Facebook is blocking the publiccode.eu open letter initiative as spam

#44

Post by Beldin »

lakomen wrote: post #28
b112 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe, they are trying to cost-save, by using algorithmic methods to block people, and spam? And maybe, just like the little guy, they should curtail, and moderate manually? There is no reason they cannot, other than it costs. And if the "little guy" can manually moderate a forum, and respond to unblock requests, then it is no problem for Facebook, or any other big player too. In truth, Facebook would still save o…

I ran a site in the mid 2000s with about 2500 forums. The site barely paid the server cost. I was no Facebook ofc. I had about a million visitors per month. So me not being able to monetize this circumstance lead to me manually fighting spam, which took up all my time. Plus answering support requests and continued development of the site as well as maintenance. I can absolutely understand they automate that. It IS im…

Meta just posted billions in profit. Profit is not money spent on improving moderation. With such affluence flowing into coffers instead of investing in sorely needed improvements, GP is absolutely correct in the underlying premise: Facebook/Meta is doing next to nothing about its moderation problem. Even though they can easily afford to put a billion into it.

Re: Tell HN: Facebook is blocking the publiccode.eu open letter initiative as spam

#45

Post by Cederfjard »

b112 wrote: post #32
lakomen wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I ran a site in the mid 2000s with about 2500 forums. The site barely paid the server cost. I was no Facebook ofc. I had about a million visitors per month. So me not being able to monetize this circumstance lead to me manually fighting spam, which took up all my time. Plus answering support requests and continued development of the site as well as maintenance. I can absolutely understand they automate that. It IS im…

Facebook has a much more profitable revenue stream than you ever had, and as I mentioned, the ability to code tools to vastly improve the moderation workflow. There is nothing wrong with automatic flagging, only with automatic action after that flagging. And key here is, a way to legitimately dispute. Your case is not a parallel case.

You seem confident in this, so I assume you have run the numbers. How many support agents do you need to moderate 3bn monthly active accounts?

Re: Tell HN: Facebook is blocking the publiccode.eu open letter initiative as spam

#46

Post by Beldin »

b112 wrote: post #36
b112 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tech corporate change has slown down significantly, in as, the market is now full of entrenched players, and the market place is extremely static compared to 20+ years ago. Plus, 20 years ago only a small number of people were on the internet compared to now. Where did all of Google's, of Facebook's growth come from? An expanding internet. That's over . US adoption rates went from basically single digits, to essentia…

And to speak to this... Electronic computers have essentially been around for a century. The internet is easentially a subset of that market, and bam!, that massive growth. With that growth has come all of this change. Some of this change is not even about the internet, but instead, about storage, capacity growth, and thus centralized control. (Not just govenment, but for example, large banks have a central office ap…

> Electronic computers have essentially been around for a century.

That's like saying cars have been around for more than a millennium, since the Romans and Egyptians already had horse-drawn carriages.

World War 2 spurred innovation in automated computing. Post-war, the first computers appeared. Still not enough for the famous quote from the 60s "i believe there's a world market for maybe 5 computers". Whether or not that's an urban legend, in the 60s, that quote was not a priori ridiculous. And let's not claim that less than 5 suffices for "being around" (eg, animals considered extinct have later been found in such numbers).

Nevertheless, let's graciously say that computers have been around since 1960. That's 62 years; rather far short of a century.

Re: Tell HN: Facebook is blocking the publiccode.eu open letter initiative as spam

#47

Post by crayboff »

entropyie wrote: post #33
lakomen wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I ran a site in the mid 2000s with about 2500 forums. The site barely paid the server cost. I was no Facebook ofc. I had about a million visitors per month. So me not being able to monetize this circumstance lead to me manually fighting spam, which took up all my time. Plus answering support requests and continued development of the site as well as maintenance. I can absolutely understand they automate that. It IS im…

Similar to arguments about getting human support from Google being impossible... There is a very simple solution: allow users to pay a modest amount, say €25, to get 10 minutes of real human support. This will immediately rule out people spamming at scale. The other side of this equation, is that if the ban is upheld, they must justify it in human terms, beyond : "the ML said it's bad". A positive judgement could the…

That would be immediately seen as Facebook charging people to be unbanned. That would lead to people claiming FB bans accounts to make money.

Re: Tell HN: Facebook is blocking the publiccode.eu open letter initiative as spam

#48

Post by kaibee »

crayboff wrote: post #47
entropyie wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar to arguments about getting human support from Google being impossible... There is a very simple solution: allow users to pay a modest amount, say €25, to get 10 minutes of real human support. This will immediately rule out people spamming at scale. The other side of this equation, is that if the ban is upheld, they must justify it in human terms, beyond : "the ML said it's bad". A positive judgement could the…

That would be immediately seen as Facebook charging people to be unbanned. That would lead to people claiming FB bans accounts to make money.

> That would lead to people claiming FB bans accounts to make money.

More realistically it probably would lead to FB banning accounts to make money. Theoretically you could setup the incentives such that money from banned accounts can only go towards paying moderators though I'm not sure if anyone would believe you.

Re: Tell HN: Facebook is blocking the publiccode.eu open letter initiative as spam

#49

Post by [deleted] »

forgotmypw17 wrote: post #5

Facebook is fighting against the "huge target on its back" effect. The bigger of an audience you are, the more interest there is in posting abusive content, whether it's spam, trolling, or something else. The result is usually that you end up digging a bigger and bigger moat around your submission and curation process, so that your service is not completely flooded with crap. I think this is what you are seeing here,…

[deleted]

Re: Tell HN: Facebook is blocking the publiccode.eu open letter initiative as spam

#50

Post by lolinder »

pmlnr wrote: post #40
learndeeply wrote: post #3

Why would facebook block an open source initiative, considering that they've contributed a ton of open source software (react, graphql, pytorch, etc)? The more simple explanation is that an automated detector misclassified the link because it shares patterns with spam links.

open source software from bigco it's only a smoke and mirrors to make it look like they are nice. https://publiccode.eu/ and the current legislation trends in the EU are not fun, because they are not able to drive the narrative.

First, whether you like React or not, it's hard to argue that the most popular JavaScript framework is "just smoke and mirrors". It might be great PR, but there's also a lot of substance to it.

Second, even if publiccode.eu doesn't help Facebook in any way, that's not evidence that they have motive to intentionally block it. You'd have to demonstrate that they have some reason to want the initiative to fail, not just claim they don't care.

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