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Twitter’s deletion of its FB app caused old cross-posts to temporarily disappear

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Re: Twitter’s deletion of its FB app caused old cross-posts to temporarily disappear

#201

Post by pdpi »

have_faith wrote: post #200

I honestly didn't think anyone cared about historical posts on any of the platforms, I'd be happy if they just auto-deleted after 30 days. Also, cross-posts from 3rd parties make up the majority of crap on my timeline. Happy to se it go and happy to see people being exposed to the fragility of relying on these free services as a backup service for anything they consider important. I hope it prompts people to consider…

Nothing about this comes from services being paid or not. Paid services blocking (or being blocked by) third parties can and does happen.

Re: Twitter’s deletion of its FB app caused old cross-posts to temporarily disappear

#202

Post by Xylakant »

pdelbarba wrote: post #56
Bucephalus355 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This: “Data is the new uranium, not the new oil”. Looks like Facebook is sitting on the largest legal liability of the 21st century. It’s kind of like being a major manufacturer in the US in 1970...you’re about to get screwed by 40+ years of environmental law (considering the river in Cleveland caught in fire in 1969, one can see why some of these laws were passed).

*caught fire 13 times (river is the Cuyahoga)

The Great Lakes Brewing Company has a Burning River Pale Ale as a toast to that. https://www.greatlakesbrewing.com/burning-river

Re: Twitter’s deletion of its FB app caused old cross-posts to temporarily disappear

#203

Post by crunchlibrarian »

MBCook wrote: post #10
Alex3917 wrote: post #3

This is pretty crazy. For people whose job is social media, this is basically the equivalent of Github just arbitrarily deciding they're going to delete all of your startup's source code without telling anyone in advance, or like Google Docs just deciding to disappear all your spreadsheets. With only a couple months until election season, Facebook is now literally editing politician's pages and deleting the campaign…

No, it’s the equivalent of GitHub deciding to remove all the code that you automatically re-post from SourceForge. In what way, AT ALL, was this this feature good for FACEBOOK? It meant people could be “on” Facebook and “active” without ever actually logging in or using the app or engaging in any way. Why would they want to just be a dumping ground for copies of another social network’s posts? I guess I’m surprised t…

Well if it's not good for a corporation then that's that, case closed, pack it in boys, we're done here.

Re: Twitter’s deletion of its FB app caused old cross-posts to temporarily disappear

#204

Post by msravi »

B-Con wrote: post #199
msravi wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Twitter removed their app from the Facebook platform which had this as an unfortunate result. > TechCrunch also heard from a source with understanding of the situation that the deletion of the app took Facebook by surprise, as well as the fact that Twitter didn’t immediately tell them to restore the content These statements seem to indicate that Twitter was to blame for removing their app. However, from the axios l…

> They probably just ought to have spoken to each other. Twitter probably should have just done the dive to verify what deleting an app does. I would guess this is mentioned somewhere in the docs.

Ok. So I spent a while on https://developers.facebook.com/docs/ and in particular on https://developers.facebook.com/docs/apps/ trying to find documentation on deleting your app. Wasn't very successful, and the search-box on the site wasn't very helpful either. In fact, the most useful documentation I could find on deleting a facebook app as a developer was on stackoverflow (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9962072/how-can-i-delete...).

Perhaps someone who is a facebook app developer can chip in to say if this info is in their docs somewhere...

Re: Twitter’s deletion of its FB app caused old cross-posts to temporarily disappear

#205

Post by toyg »

munchbunny wrote: post #14

Based on the article, the intended behavior was to disallow third parties to post as the user, going forward. But what actually happened was that historic third party app posts also got hidden/deleted? I feel like that's a pretty obvious problem you would anticipate and write tests for, isn't it? How did something like this manage to get to public rollout?

The two issues are disjointed - Facebook didn't foresee a situation where, after a feature was blocked, the disgruntled app developers would completely pull their integrations - or at least no developer the size of Twitter. Had they not reacted like that, the new blocks alone wouldn't have deleted anything.

Re: Twitter’s deletion of its FB app caused old cross-posts to temporarily disappear

#206

Post by Jare »

msravi wrote: post #204
B-Con wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They probably just ought to have spoken to each other. Twitter probably should have just done the dive to verify what deleting an app does. I would guess this is mentioned somewhere in the docs.

Ok. So I spent a while on https://developers.facebook.com/docs/ and in particular on https://developers.facebook.com/docs/apps/ trying to find documentation on deleting your app. Wasn't very successful, and the search-box on the site wasn't very helpful either. In fact, the most useful documentation I could find on deleting a facebook app as a developer was on stackoverflow ( https://stackoverflow.com/questions/99620…

I stopped developing Facebook apps a few years ago, but when we wound down our games, we did not delete the apps fearing precisely this problem, or related future problems like app name impersonation, squatting, etc. It just seemed too easy to imagine scenarios where deleting the apps could cause trouble, and the docs were useless for this.

We simply turned the apps off (don't remember exact wording). Last I checked my dev email, I was still getting emails from Facebook warning of API changes and informing of our games' metrics and activity (!), so it is true that deleting an app is cleaner.

Re: Twitter’s deletion of its FB app caused old cross-posts to temporarily disappear

#207

Post by mcculley »

PaulMest wrote: post #168

Facebook did not purposely remove the cross-posted tweets. Twitter removed their app from the Facebook platform which had this as an unfortunate result. Source: https://www.axios.com/how-cross-posted-tweets-disappeared-fr...

"Move Fast and Break Things"

This is a great example of big tech companies not thinking about the consequences of their actions.

Re: Twitter’s deletion of its FB app caused old cross-posts to temporarily disappear

#208

Post by Jare »

paradite wrote: post #179
PaulMest wrote: post #168

Facebook did not purposely remove the cross-posted tweets. Twitter removed their app from the Facebook platform which had this as an unfortunate result. Source: https://www.axios.com/how-cross-posted-tweets-disappeared-fr...

The title has been changed to "Twitter’s deletion of its Facebook app caused old cross-posts to temporarily disappear" on techcrunch. The Hacker News title should be updated as well.

Given the actual content of the update, the "temporarily" sounds more hopeful than factual.

Re: Twitter’s deletion of its FB app caused old cross-posts to temporarily disappear

#209

Post by SmellyGeekBoy »

egfx wrote: post #171
GhostVII wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like it wasn't intentional, as Facebook has said they are looking into it, rather than putting out a post explaining their reasoning behind it.

It was intentional and posted about here https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/link-twitt... and there was an HN story about this 19 days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17721986 why is TechCrunch just picking up on this now?

Intentional on Twitter's part, yes. They're the ones who deleted their app.

Re: Twitter’s deletion of its FB app caused old cross-posts to temporarily disappear

#210

Post by SmellyGeekBoy »

magic_beans wrote: post #36
AdamTReineke wrote: post #6

Holy shit... Literally ten years of Facebook posts and people's comments on them just up and disappeared from my profile. How is that ok?

Because Facebook can do whatever it wants??

I'm not sure why you were downvoted for this. It's right there in their ToS.
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