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Facebook adding “fbclid” parameter to outbound links

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Re: Facebook adding “fbclid” parameter to outbound links

#71

This is breaking some links. You might believe it "shouldn't", and a server "should" ignore the added params, but the reality is it's breaking them. This past weekend, I posted a link to an image on Facebook, and FB generated the preview fine, but created a link that 404's. My link: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Byv5uWSIIAEf38C.jpg Facebook made: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Byv5uWSIIAEf38C.jpg?fbclid=IwAR2... I guess i…

I believe it was breaking all NYMag links today, appears fixed on NYMags end now.

https://www.facebook.com/NewYorkMag

Re: Facebook adding “fbclid” parameter to outbound links

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As in "I was against child labour, but then I've inherited textile factory in China and paying adult wages is not efficient".

The point I was trying to make is: before I worked in the growth team at several mid-sized startups, I had this naive assumption that tracking data was basically the food for an evil monster. I had this idea of an evil group of people getting together everyday and looking at this data and somehow using it to puppet my entire online-life. Sure, this group of people exists at every decent sized online company, and sure…

> Again, if you're saying that increasing our efficiency in sales is a bad thing, you're saying that capitalism is bad. But I've just come to see this data as something that enables product evolution to occur much faster. I see this data as something that's helping the world, mostly, get more of what it wants.

Unfortunately, I've seen too many product decisions catering to the manipulative aspects of adtech. UX often suffers, not improves with ads. Online platforms all seem to follow the same game ad monetization plan these days which results in messes like Frankensteinish apps--see official Twitter app.

As for actual hands on manufactured products or services, I'd like to know how ads improved the UX.

Re: Facebook adding “fbclid” parameter to outbound links

#73

There are a number of comments here who seem genuinely happy about this. This is a perspective that is hard for me to understand, largely because I'm strongly in the pro-privacy, anti-tracking ideology. So if you are part of the group who sees this as a good thing, I'm genuinely interested to understand why you see this as a good thing and whether you view the mass surveillance of the general public by advertising co…

Engineer here: I used to be completely anti-tracking. Then, I started needing analytics for my own business. Without analytics, I wouldn't be able to sell with efficiency, and therefore, I wouldn't have a business. Granted, the anti-consumerist in me thinks maybe as a society we shouldn't be so concerned with our efficiency to sell. But, we live in a capitalist world, and I don't see that changing any time soon. The…

The FAANGAMUs acronym doesn’t have a lot of hits, what did you add Microsoft Uber and Airbnb?

Re: Facebook adding “fbclid” parameter to outbound links

#74

This is breaking some links. You might believe it "shouldn't", and a server "should" ignore the added params, but the reality is it's breaking them. This past weekend, I posted a link to an image on Facebook, and FB generated the preview fine, but created a link that 404's. My link: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Byv5uWSIIAEf38C.jpg Facebook made: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Byv5uWSIIAEf38C.jpg?fbclid=IwAR2... I guess i…

it also broke a couple of safe paste sites for me, that's /r/assholedesign

Re: Facebook adding “fbclid” parameter to outbound links

#75
post #71

This is breaking some links. You might believe it "shouldn't", and a server "should" ignore the added params, but the reality is it's breaking them. This past weekend, I posted a link to an image on Facebook, and FB generated the preview fine, but created a link that 404's. My link: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Byv5uWSIIAEf38C.jpg Facebook made: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Byv5uWSIIAEf38C.jpg?fbclid=IwAR2... I guess i…

I believe it was breaking all NYMag links today, appears fixed on NYMags end now. https://www.facebook.com/NewYorkMag

Sure, where "fixed on NYMags end" means "NYMags has implemented a workaround because FB broke things".

Re: Facebook adding “fbclid” parameter to outbound links

#76
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Without analytics, I wouldn't be able to sell with efficiency, and therefore, I wouldn't have a business. I guess your summary is about right. > we live in a capitalist world, and I don't see that changing any time soon. We were living in a capitalist world two decades ago, and we didn't have a significant amount of tracking back then. If you are concerned about your competition using tracking, then just try to mak…

If you are concerned with making a better product, you are going to need quite a bit of tracking and instrumentation to understand how to make a better product.

Using analytics to understand what users are thinking is like using tea leaves to divine the future. Just ask them.

Re: Facebook adding “fbclid” parameter to outbound links

#77

There are a number of comments here who seem genuinely happy about this. This is a perspective that is hard for me to understand, largely because I'm strongly in the pro-privacy, anti-tracking ideology. So if you are part of the group who sees this as a good thing, I'm genuinely interested to understand why you see this as a good thing and whether you view the mass surveillance of the general public by advertising co…

Engineer here: I used to be completely anti-tracking. Then, I started needing analytics for my own business. Without analytics, I wouldn't be able to sell with efficiency, and therefore, I wouldn't have a business. Granted, the anti-consumerist in me thinks maybe as a society we shouldn't be so concerned with our efficiency to sell. But, we live in a capitalist world, and I don't see that changing any time soon. The…

"Sell with efficiency" sounds a bit vampiric to me; a bit growth-at-all-costs or refusing to accept the normal costs of doing business (although I can sympathise with that mindset).

Where do you draw the line? This is parallel to the discussion around government surveillance. Just be cause they / you can, doesn't mean they / you should.

If Internet tracking had no potential use to governments then they'd be regulating the shit out of it. The problem is that governments want their own noses in the same trough, and so all these privacy-invasive technologies continue to be developed. The fact that it's not illegal means that anyone with the ability to implement it can, as long as they can sleep at night.

As to solutions that could help with "selling efficiency", maybe some kind of agreed tiers of analytics from benign to spooky that users can opt-in / opt-out of when visiting a website or using an app. Which GDPR is a bit of a kludgy solution for. The problem is that it only takes one bad advertiser to break agreed rules and the trust is gone again for all advertisers.

One bad apple.

Analytics are unquestionably useful. Collecting the data without user consent is what potentially should be regulated.

Re: Facebook adding “fbclid” parameter to outbound links

#79

> you should always explicitly set the canonical URL for each page. Could someone explain or give a reliable article that explains this well?

When Google crawls your site, it doesn't know the difference between two urls with the same path, but with different GET params.

Theres no way for them to know whether or not the extra params on the URL change the result page. (i.e. example.com/index.php?post_id=1 and example.com/index.php?comment_id=1 could be very different pages, or they could be the same; you don't know).

So in comes the canonical url! This tells Google the proper url required for a specific page. That way if Google gets to a page using two different urls, it can tell that they are the same page.

You can list it by adding a tag to your HTML head.

You can even do face things like rewrite urls entirely (i.e. If the crawler hits example.com/?category_id=1&item_id=2, you can correct the ugly url by listing the canonical url as example.com/category/1/item/2)

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en

Re: Facebook adding “fbclid” parameter to outbound links

#80

There are a number of comments here who seem genuinely happy about this. This is a perspective that is hard for me to understand, largely because I'm strongly in the pro-privacy, anti-tracking ideology. So if you are part of the group who sees this as a good thing, I'm genuinely interested to understand why you see this as a good thing and whether you view the mass surveillance of the general public by advertising co…

My guess that it's the Facebook employees, advertisers and marketing people who like this. There's a flawed belief that it's necessary. UX on the other hand suggests otherwise. AdTech is not concerned with UX though and tries to wrap targeting in some kind of pseudo user benefit—spin. Good products and services sell even without tracking. Advertising is an economic powerhouse though and will always push for anti-UX t…

Hell, good products and services sell without advertising!

Advertisers study how to sell a product, and the most important product they have to sell is advertising.

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