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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

#61

Post by b112 »

Beldin wrote: post #46
b112 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Eniac was around in the 40s, and electromechanical computers before it.

Eniac meets the test, hands down. But, 80 years or 100, close enough.

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

#62

Post by IntrepidWorm »

tomc1985 wrote: post #59
IntrepidWorm wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Legally, the government can force compliance by large technical companies. In practice, there's no current chance of that happening. Believing that Facebook, Google, Twitter et. al. are beholden to the government given the past several years is somewhat laughable. Government is slow, and tech business is fast. Our politicians cannot keep up, even when they try.

This sort of naive, haughty attitude is why I can't stand hanging out with tech people in person any more.

Naive - definitely. But I'm speaking to what seems to me a fairly common observation. Feel free to criticize! I'm not so sure about haughty- that doesn't feel like a good faith interpretation.

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

#64

Post by tomc1985 »

IntrepidWorm wrote: post #62
tomc1985 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sort of naive, haughty attitude is why I can't stand hanging out with tech people in person any more.

Naive - definitely. But I'm speaking to what seems to me a fairly common observation. Feel free to criticize! I'm not so sure about haughty- that doesn't feel like a good faith interpretation.

> tech business is fast

Not nearly as fast as it used to be, except when it comes to breaking things. They get away with it because of folks' relentless optimism towards anything tech-related, and the fact that we are all used to muddling through random issues

Every time I hear someone express that users' bandwidth or compute are free and freely available, I cringe so hard...

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

#65

Post by forgotmypw17 »

b112 wrote: post #23
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,…

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 agree that leveraged manual moderation is the future, and there is no way around it.

The problem for Facebook is that the requirement for more moderators grows roughly linearly with the userbase, but the attractiveness to abusers grows exponentially.

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

#66

Post by ffhhj »

dusted wrote: post #63

Update: I'm now able to post the link, I'm totally sure it has NOTHING AT ALL to do with this making HN frontpage, just a funny coincidence.

Something similar happened to me after criticizing Youtube's playlist drag speed on an HN comment, then they fixed that. Happy coincidences, right?

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

#67

Post by TomSwirly »

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,…

> They are just so much bigger than this one individual that they simply cannot see me, the same way I cannot see a bacteria, and may not notice a tiny gnat.

"They're too big to do the right thing, so suck it up." What a terrible idea.

If Facebook is really that big, they should be broken up.

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

#68

Post by emilz0r »

cuteboy19 wrote: post #56
lolinder wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Does metabook create government related software? I can understand such behaviour from Microsoft, not sure what the motivation would be for FB

Workplace from Meta is not targeted specifically for governments, but are used by government orgs I've worked at.

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

#69

Post by forgotmypw17 »

TomSwirly wrote: post #67
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,…

> They are just so much bigger than this one individual that they simply cannot see me, the same way I cannot see a bacteria, and may not notice a tiny gnat. "They're too big to do the right thing, so suck it up." What a terrible idea. If Facebook is really that big, they should be broken up.

The reality is that Facebook is huge, and I personally cannot break them up, nor can I take any action that is likely to make it happen, so I am left with finding the best way to operate in this reality.

For me, that means creating my own little corner of the Internet which I'm comfortable in, and limiting my interactions with the giants.

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

#70

Post by forgotmypw17 »

bavell wrote: post #55
Cederfjard wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

We don't know because they haven't even tried, they'd rather make excuses which conveniently also make them richer.

I haven't tried it either, but I've tried moderating a decent size community, though nowhere near the numbers of Facebook, of course.

There are two challenges which combine into one problem:

1) The amount of bad content posted to a forum rises exponentially with the size of the membership. For every x new people reading, x^y bad content is posted. This is because a large target becomes much more attractive to spammers, trolls, and anyone else looking for a cheap audience.

2) It is extremely difficult to find good moderators. A good moderator will be, within reason, consistent, reliable, AND unbiased. Even with a salary at stake, it is difficult to find people who are even two of those things.

In order to succeed in moderating content well, you need to leverage reliable moderators (today, this means rare humans) with unreliable ones (text analysis and less rare humans) through some sort of statistical system. To date, we have not found a reliable system which can work at scale with this problem, but my faith is in a transparent and verifiable web of trust type system. Slashdot does pretty well, but it's still too opaque, in my opinion.

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