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How meta built the infrastructure for Threads

engineering.fb.com

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Re: How meta built the infrastructure for Threads

#71

Post by roland35 »

lapcat wrote: post #50
Jare wrote: post #39

Offtopic but here we go: Once Threads became available in the EU I, like I assume many others, made an Instagram account from my FB account in order to check it out. 2 days later, and without having posted anything except perhaps a "Hello world", my Insta account was banned for generic reason (breaking the TOS, nothing concrete). I only found out 2 weeks later, as I hadn't even visited the site(s) again. Their "Appea…

In trying to sign up for Threads, I was insta-banned when I created an Instagram account, without even having a chance to use it, for allegedly violating the ToS, which seems impossible, since I hadn't done anything yet. They wanted to extract my phone number from me, and then also a photo/video after that to "verify" my identity, so I aborted the process, because I'm not going to feed the data slurping machine. I th…

Having worked at these large companies, I can almost guarantee that what happened was something unintentional or silly versus nefarious. The number of privacy reviews to add a data collection around bans would be astronomical and I would feel bad for that engineer working on that hypothetical feature haha.

Re: How meta built the infrastructure for Threads

#72

Post by stetrain »

ranting-moth wrote: post #51
pests wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Threads is their Twitter / text-only offering.

Worth mentioning it's also a data harvesting app-only offering.

There's a web version, and if they do follow through on their Activity Pub integration (which they have already demonstrated in a very limited capacity) then you'll be able to use whatever client you want to follow Threads users.

Re: How meta built the infrastructure for Threads

#73

Post by dissident_coder »

captn3m0 wrote: post #56
Jare wrote: post #39

Offtopic but here we go: Once Threads became available in the EU I, like I assume many others, made an Instagram account from my FB account in order to check it out. 2 days later, and without having posted anything except perhaps a "Hello world", my Insta account was banned for generic reason (breaking the TOS, nothing concrete). I only found out 2 weeks later, as I hadn't even visited the site(s) again. Their "Appea…

This is true for all Meta/Google/Twitter properties. No phone number results in a high chance of suspension irrespective of your usage.

It's a bot prevention measure (allegedly). It also conveniently blocks out people that are more likely to not want to share all of their personal information with them. No skin off my back, the less toxic social media garbage I'm allowed to use, the better for my sanity, good riddance.

Re: How meta built the infrastructure for Threads

#74

Post by stetrain »

saberience wrote: post #25
o10449366 wrote: post #18

[flagged]

I don't want to seem overly critical, but why is this comment relevant to an engineering focused article on how Threads was built? This article isn't FUD and your comment adds nothing to the discussion except setting up a strange strawman to attack for some reason I can't quite fathom. I don't want to see HN become more like Reddit where comments like this tend to dominate, they don't add to the community and only pr…

This comment follows multiple others in this thread calling Threads a "dead app" and a waste of money and development resources. Which seem equally irrelevant to the topic and incite this kind of discussion.

Re: How meta built the infrastructure for Threads

#75

Post by broscillator »

surgical_fire wrote: post #52
rglullis wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's up to the government and the courts to go after them Except that the government benefits from their financial success (through taxation and political donations) and the courts are more likely than not following laws that were written to favor them and their interests (through lobbying and regulatory capture), so how do you see this actually happening?

I live in a democracy. The government didn't pop into existence by manifestation of an unseen will, the society in which I live elected them. If people voted for a government that is butt buddies with the large corporations that exploit society through lobbying and regulatory capture, then the values of that society are already represented, and everyone compromised into unethical corporations having their way. What i…

It's comments like these that make me more afraid of AI, because I notice how many people behave or reason like bots, following a script.

Re: How meta built the infrastructure for Threads

#76

Post by pphysch »

jonathanstrange wrote: post #16
adonese wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually okay-ish so far. The people and the news are still on twitter but with the bots (twitter) and Facebook support (infrastructure, integration with existing fb products and the leaner upselling) I can see that it does have a good product market fit

Honestly, I can't believe any real person still uses Twitter. I haven't subscribed to anyone and have no subscribers. Nevertheless, whenever I open it, I'm swamped with US Neo-Nazi tweets, as well as pro-Russia and pro-Hamas content. I'm not saying it's the only content I see, but enough to make Twitter look like the front page of a terrorist organization. Apparently, the Twitter algorithm has learned that I'm using…

> I'm swamped with US Neo-Nazi tweets, as well as pro-Russia and pro-Hamas content.

> adjusted its content accordingly to convince me of a hundred times more radical positions

Globally, these positions are not radical (sans Neo-Nazi). The average human is (strongly) opposed to American foreign policy, if not outright pro-Russian/pro-Palestinian.

That said, these topics are also great engagement bait and X does push them for that reason.

Re: How meta built the infrastructure for Threads

#77

Post by lapcat »

Nextgrid wrote: post #69
lapcat wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My guess is that you signed up through a VPN Your guess is wrong. I don't use any VPN. Why is everyone trying to find reasons to blame the victims?

> Why is everyone trying to find reasons to blame the victims? Not OP but I'm not blaming the victim. I'm just trying to explain the reasons why the situation is like that and suggested (regulatory) solutions - the only solutions that would actually work.

You are blaming the victim:

> there's something about your software stack and/or behavior that makes you "naughty" in the eyes of Facebook. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38913992

In any case, your assumptions come with zero empirical evidence. It's just wild speculation, grasping at straws, looking for a "good reason" for Instagram to charge me with a completely unwarranted ToS violation. We all know that is a blatant lie.

Re: How meta built the infrastructure for Threads

#78

Post by nimajneb »

Jare wrote: post #39

Offtopic but here we go: Once Threads became available in the EU I, like I assume many others, made an Instagram account from my FB account in order to check it out. 2 days later, and without having posted anything except perhaps a "Hello world", my Insta account was banned for generic reason (breaking the TOS, nothing concrete). I only found out 2 weeks later, as I hadn't even visited the site(s) again. Their "Appea…

Another weird experience I had with this company is when I deactivated my FB account. A few months later a friend texted me and asked if I was going to an event. Apparently he had invited me to it on FB and FB didn't tell him my account is deactivated... So I never saw the invite and the system didn't tell him I didn't see it. I tested this with my wife, you still show up in invitable people and probably invite suggestions even when your account is deactivated. That makes no sense to me.

Re: How meta built the infrastructure for Threads

#79

Post by Nextgrid »

roland35 wrote: post #71
lapcat wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In trying to sign up for Threads, I was insta-banned when I created an Instagram account, without even having a chance to use it, for allegedly violating the ToS, which seems impossible, since I hadn't done anything yet. They wanted to extract my phone number from me, and then also a photo/video after that to "verify" my identity, so I aborted the process, because I'm not going to feed the data slurping machine. I th…

Having worked at these large companies, I can almost guarantee that what happened was something unintentional or silly versus nefarious. The number of privacy reviews to add a data collection around bans would be astronomical and I would feel bad for that engineer working on that hypothetical feature haha.

> I can almost guarantee that what happened was something unintentional

It's unintentional on paper because nobody is stupid enough to put in writing that they intentionally make the ban mechanism very trigger-happy in order to collect more personal information.

On the other hand, it works in their favor, so there will not be any attempts at fixing this trigger-happiness either.

> The number of privacy reviews to add a data collection around bans

The number of privacy reviews to add a data collection around bans would be astronomical

Just like the privacy reviews that ultimately get them to continuously do things that are in breach of the GDPR and that even a layman with no specific legal/tech knowledge would consider creepy/unethical/illegal?

> I would feel bad for that engineer

That's the thing, there is no single engineer working on this. There is no ticket "increase the amount of personal information given by people" - as per my first point it would be a huge liability to put something like this in writing.

However, one engineer working on the ban system might have its KPIs tied to the amount of "bad" people blocked, where "bad" can be deemed as someone who got challenged and didn't subsequently complete or pass the additional verification (the thinking is that a legit user would have nothing to hide and complete the verification, and indeed many do). This effectively encourages ban trigger-happyness and indirectly increases data collection while being completely deniable.

Remember that these companies are not stupid/incompetent - there's lots of money at stake to get this "right" (in their own way - aka beneficial to their business model). They just have to pretend to be stupid/incompetent in order to get plausible deniability and deflect eventual litigation/regulation.

Re: How meta built the infrastructure for Threads

#80

Post by Nextgrid »

lapcat wrote: post #77
Nextgrid wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why is everyone trying to find reasons to blame the victims? Not OP but I'm not blaming the victim. I'm just trying to explain the reasons why the situation is like that and suggested (regulatory) solutions - the only solutions that would actually work.

You are blaming the victim: > there's something about your software stack and/or behavior that makes you "naughty" in the eyes of Facebook. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38913992 In any case, your assumptions come with zero empirical evidence. It's just wild speculation, grasping at straws, looking for a "good reason" for Instagram to charge me with a completely unwarranted ToS violation. We all know that is a…

I'm just explaining the truth. I'm not saying it should be considered OK - we should absolutely look down on the behavior and look for solutions to discourage it.

Obviously without looking at the code behind it I can only speculate, but I think my speculation agrees pretty well with their business model and why they might choose to ban people whose analytics data (or lack thereof) matches yours. In fact, it's indeed not a ban, since you can appeal it by providing extra personal data - the concept of "bullshit ban -> provide personal info for security -> automatic unban" procedure is routine nowadays, pioneered by Twitter.

> charge me with a completely unwarranted ToS violation

I'm not defending their claim - we all know "ToS violation" has been bullshit since the dawn of startups. It's the generic "unhandled exception"/500 error equivalent of the software world.

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