Facebook Stops You From Posting ‘Irrelevant Or Inappropriate’ Comments

What is the point of that comparison? The purpose of HN is very different from the purpose of Facebook. On this site, comments are everything - they define the site.

Joel Spolsky gave an interesting talk on the "Cultural Anthropology of StackExchange" where he talks about the importance of keeping people out as a tool for building communities. The prime example was StackExchange vs. Yahoo Answers.

Hi, fb engineer here. This is exactly what's going on. If you recall, there were several articles written a few months back pertaining to comment spam, and very low quality comments (ascii art or 'LOOOOOL!!!') from subscribers. This is part of an effort to curb that and has likely gone awry. It only affects subscriber -> subscribee comments.

Also take in to consideration Facebook is trying to get companies to spend a lot on advertising their Facebook pages.

One way for Facebook to do this is prevent users from making "irrelevant or inappropriate" on the advertiser's page.

I have never seen a message like this before, but I rarely post comments on Facebook. I have, however, had issues with business associates spamming me. I found out firsthand just how difficult it was to unjoin a group. I also noticed that I could flag a comment as spam, it disappears, and then magically re-appears again later. These "spammers" still have their accounts.

Facebook is basically a controlled platform for spamming. Its for attractive girls to spam photographs of themselves to hundreds or thousands of males. Its for companies to blast out their messages to millions of people. There is little question that Zynga's initial growth came from saturating player's friends feeds with notices about their farm. All supported by Facebook's aggressive opt-in by default email notifications. If that isn't spam, I don't know what is.

Facebook's business model is one of figuring out how to monetize all of this noise without scaring away its users. One way you do this by making spam more relevant. The other way is by ensuring "spammers" that want to be seen fork over sizable amounts of money. This is something anyone buying in to their IPO should think a lot about.

As negative as that sounds, I like Facebook a lot. I refuse to use Google+ or any other social network. Because of Facebook I've been able to keep in touch with a lot of people who I would have never seen or heard from again in my life.

That said, I've seen a disturbing trend in my Facebook friend's list of attractive females de-activating their accounts (attractive females make or break socially connected platforms.) There is too much noise for them. And you bet, if something is "irrelevant or inappropriate" they will be the first to leave.

Misleading story. I call it censorship when your comment is more or less removed "because you believe in [insert cause, religion or candidate here]" not because of an imperfect algo trying to remove spam.

So FB tries to filter out ASCII art.

It sounds to me like FB is trying to win over advertisers who really are not interested in the web, except to the extent they can profit from it. And they may learn FB has led them to believe there is much more potential than the results actually show.

Meanwhile, the "consumers" using the web are generally interested in it. That includes ASCII art and LOL, as a means of communication. And not simply to discuss, purchase products and services.

FB is going to fade away. It's just a matter of time.

Because their motives are becoming more and more clear to even non-technical users, these motives are antithetical to the social (cf. commercial) premise of the internet, and they cannot maintain a monopoly on communication through the web, excluding other avenues by being "the only option". Couple this with advertisers who are still patiently waiting for results, results which will never come.

How can you call this anything other than censorship? There is no profanity, no objectionable content whatsoever in the post.

It's not "isolated", it's "targeted".