People are still using Facebook?
Facebook Stops You From Posting ‘Irrelevant Or Inappropriate’ Comments
31–40 of 75 posts
Re: Facebook Stops You From Posting ‘Irrelevant Or Inappropriate’ Comments
#32Google+ needs to do this. I follow Linus Torvals and some other big names in tech, and there are dozens of worthless comments on every single one of his posts. "+1" "Wow,,,,,,,,,,, " "。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。 " Incredibly low signal-to-noise, which makes me not even want to look at the comments.
If it was an opt-in thing it would be great.
Re: Facebook Stops You From Posting ‘Irrelevant Or Inappropriate’ Comments
#33This is an isolated incident. "Irrelevant or Inappropriate" sounds like a euphemism for spam- if Facebook is fighting comment spam then I applaud them. Their algorithm just isn't quite right yet. No story here. "Is this censorship?" Are false positives on a spam filter censorship?
It's definitely not isolated, and it definitely feels like censorship. A company shouldn't be deciding what we can or can't say, especially if it's not profane. They once tried to block me from posting a link to a site that was critical of facebook.
I find it interesting that your comment and the one above it, both of which express mild, but polite disagreement, were downvoted into grey.
Re: Facebook Stops You From Posting ‘Irrelevant Or Inappropriate’ Comments
#34This is an isolated incident. "Irrelevant or Inappropriate" sounds like a euphemism for spam- if Facebook is fighting comment spam then I applaud them. Their algorithm just isn't quite right yet. No story here. "Is this censorship?" Are false positives on a spam filter censorship?
We have spam here on HN as well. We just deal with it differently - downvoted comments are not censored, made less obvious so that the casual reader doesn't need to read them. That is not censorship. Facebook's approach is.
No, spam gets killed. Voting is the standard way to deal with bad comments, but egregious abuses only show up if you have showdead on.
Re: Facebook Stops You From Posting ‘Irrelevant Or Inappropriate’ Comments
#35Google+ needs to do this. I follow Linus Torvals and some other big names in tech, and there are dozens of worthless comments on every single one of his posts. "+1" "Wow,,,,,,,,,,, " "。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。 " Incredibly low signal-to-noise, which makes me not even want to look at the comments.
I like the HN way of doing things, where every user can choose their own showdead setting.
Re: Facebook Stops You From Posting ‘Irrelevant Or Inappropriate’ Comments
#36Hey, where’s my “Generate an appropriate comment” button?
According to Mark Zuckerberg, people using Facebook are “dumb fucks,” so probably they should be guided?
Re: Facebook Stops You From Posting ‘Irrelevant Or Inappropriate’ Comments
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 communicat…
I think that's an overwhelmingly negative perspective. Facebook was (for me, at least) a draw initially because it wasn't drowning in crap like MySpace was. It was a locked down experience, and everyone benefitted from it. In all honesty, I don't see this as a dramatic move away from that idea.
The MySpace interface was an abomination. The fact that users would tolerate it says something about the standard one has to meet to hold an audience. It's not very high.
FB has a clean interface, generally, but it's what's going on "behind the scenes" that is at issue here.
Re: Facebook Stops You From Posting ‘Irrelevant Or Inappropriate’ Comments
#38This happens to me fairly often. Though I seem to get this warning more: https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-snc7/374152_...
Wow, that’s pretty “nice.”
P.S. {temporarily removed}
Re: Facebook Stops You From Posting ‘Irrelevant Or Inappropriate’ Comments
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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 communicat…
Another FB engineer here - I actually work on the system that caused this false positive. You're right that if we were actually trying to stop constructive discussion from happening, that would be bad. We're definitely not trying to do that - in fact, our goal is the exact opposite.
Similarly, if we let through blatantly malicious or spammy comments, I think that would be bad as well.
While I wish I could say we were perfect at stopping spam, the reality is that no spam classification system is perfect. Sometimes we err too far on the conservative side, and spam gets through. Sometimes we err too far on the aggressive side, and good content is incorrectly blocked. That's what happened here - it turned out one of our spam classifiers was a little too aggressive, and we've turned it off.
Re: Facebook Stops You From Posting ‘Irrelevant Or Inappropriate’ Comments
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's exactly this. Let's not forget the quality of techcrunch comments improved by an order of magnitude as soon as they switched to Facebook's comment system, which has the best spam/troll detection I've ever seen. A tiny number of false positives is a fair price in my mind.
I'd rather pay with false negatives when it comes to comments.
I agree - we've turned off the classifier that caused this false positive, as it's clearly too aggressive.