During the time Facebook (and related properties) have been unavailable, I can't help but feel a little better about the world. There is so much hate, arguments, misinformation, angry, and harmful messaging on FB platforms. It's nice to know all of that crap is just....gone. At least for a little while.
It's interesting how Facebook experiences differ. To me it's a peaceful place showing mundane updates from friends and family, with zero politics. Plus, a bunch of niche hobby groups I subscribed, full of very kind and constructive people.
The actual war zone to me is Twitter, not Facebook.
I'm from the US and have the same experience. Just glancing at my feed it's:
Somebody celebrating getting out of rehab.
Somebody heading to Italy for vacation.
Somebody going in a hot air balloon.
Somebody going to Santa Fe for vacation and asking for things to do.
Somebody said last night was one of the best nights of their life.
Somebody sharing progress updates on their offgrid homestead.
Somebody got a new pizza oven for National pizza month
Somebody going on a train ride.
Somebody telling me that Dune movie tickets go on sale today (cool).
A bunch of posts from a tesla owners group, laser cutter operators group, and sailing groups that I am a part of.
A bunch of posts from buy nothing, and housing groups that I'm a part of.
I see literally nothing related to politics.
However, jumping over to twitter it's:
Something about "the establishment"
A news story about somebody getting shot.
Something about counterterrorism strategies.
North Korean FUD
Something about a gunfight and a DEA agent being killed.
etc. etc.
Facebook seems to me to be a place where people come together and talk to each other about happy things happening in their lives (or sometimes, looking for support when sad things happen).
Twitter seems like a place people go to get angry and scream at each other.
I quit FB for a bit over a year then came back because I missed connecting with people. I was quickly shocked by what I was actually 'missing'. The thing that jumped out at me was a former elementary/high school classmate who was literally arguing for vehicular manslaughter (murder?) -- that protesters should be run over at high-speeds for blocking the freeway[0].
Now, that's one post from one person. Yes, it's an outlier, but there was a ton of truly corrosive shit people were posting. I quickly found that for me, getting out of FB altogether was the best option. I deleted my account a while back and I don't miss it.
I get that people can actively curate their feed and use FB as a tool for communication, but for me, that's far too much effort and wasn't worth it. I'm actually quite sad -- the promise of what FB could be falls far short of what it is.
The obvious question to me here is why you're "friends" with people like that? One of you sent the friend request in the first place and the other accepted. If/when it turns up you made a mistake with either step it's easy to undo it. As you said it's mostly outliers. Most people don't post/comment at all and the ones who do you can easily regulate (unfriend, or create a custom list (either black- or whitelist) if you need to stay "friends" for whatever reason).
> The obvious question to me here is why you're "friends" with people like that?
I'm sure a lot of people loved others who have had drug addictions, joined a cult, or were fed misinformation by a group of zealots. Sometimes being a friend means "in spite of" not "because of".
As it happens, this individual was the shortest-lived connection I had on the platform. I had gone back on, received and accepted the friend request, and they posted that shortly thereafter, at which point I immediately unfriended them. It wasn't long after that I decided to scrap the whole endeavor.
Same here. I'm not a FB fan but I still use it. I do have a few old friends or acquaintances who post pictures of their families and vacations. It's not the most intellectual content but it's certainly not toxic and it let me stay in touch with people.
Even with your feed I could see someone getting depressed if they couldn't afford vacations in Italy, hot air balloon rides, etc.
Anyway, maybe you're using Facebook correctly, but clearly enough of the world isn't to cause problems. Do you expect all those folks to change, or is it easier to regulate Facebook itself?
I wonder how much this is country-specific. I always see Americans decry the content on Twitter. I'm in Australia and follow mostly Australians. I'm sure there is outrage somewhere, but I don't see much in my feed.
I'm surprised to hear you even have content. That was Facebook for me like 7 years ago. Now it's a ghost town and the only people left are people hitting the share button on low effort posts. I did block almost all of the people who post or share political stuff from one side
Pizza isn't really/doesn't have to be that unhealthy. Fast food takeaway pizza is of course, but 'pizza' is redundant in that.
Pretty much all that makes a homemade or otherwise decent pizza less healthy than a sandwich is the amount of it one typically eats in a sitting. Or of course if you for some reason pile unhealthy stuff high on your pizzas, but stuff your sandwiches with the height of nutrition. But I assume that would be uncommon.
It's just marketing, I don't see what globalisation particularly has to do with it. Capitalism perhaps, but only to the (debatable) extent that it's responsible for marketing.
You don't see what being connected as a whole (world) has to do with creating social calendar dates? Really?
These things are figments of marketing imagination. They spread through people, not TV or ads. Albeit they start that way. You can throw $$$ at making the 1st of September world Tie day, but it's up to the people to make it stick. Which is becoming increasingly easy as we become a whole connected people.
Sales (lower priced periods) are marketing. "National ___ day" is way more than that.
> You don't see what being connected as a whole (world) has to do with creating social calendar dates? Really?
Well firstly I meant economic globalisation, I was thinking in terms of trade; it seems it has broader/other usages too that I didn't realise. Secondly I'd point to days like Mothering Sunday/Mothers' Day which has a slew of different dates throughout the connected world (even the countries where it's a wholly secular marketing creation can't agree):
> These things are figments of marketing imagination.
Did you mean not? Otherwise we're in agreement.
> You can throw $$$ at making the 1st of September world Tie day, but it's up to the people to make it stick.
They don't need to stick, very few do, you hear for the first time about world tie day in late August, maybe get persuaded to buy a wacky new tie, and then forget all about it - or at least when it is - again.
Sure, although it doesn't seem to be doing very well at the targetting. All of the ads seem to revolve around a singular life event that I recently posted about.
I try to avoid reddit.com/r/all and have my subreddits pared down to dogs, mechanical keyboards, tesla stuff, cryptocurrency, sailing, and locally-relevant things (city subs for the places I have homes).
I'd say facebook is: older people sharing stuff about their life. Benign posts about traveling, maybe some light complaining about the neighborhood where they live getting too expensive, complaining about their job or sports or something like that etc.
Twitter is: younger people who are angry at the world and looking for a scapegoat. Everything is "here's why $outgroup is the core of all the problems in the world in 240 characters or less". Absolutely psychologically abusive garbage.
Reddit is like twitter, but more of an impotent rage. Lots of corporate pop culture references, but still with a strong dose of "here's why $outgroup is so bad!"
Looking at some of the parenting subs I'm on, some of the top posts are prompts for people to explain how terrible things in the world are.
Just really really toxic, awful things.
If I had to guess why: facebook is relatively private. The only things I see are either from people choose to follow explicitly, or from a tier-2 follow like a group (which I can filter if the group starts veering into toxicity).
Twitter is explicitly public. You see and interact with everything from everybody. There seems to be a strong ephasis on sharing other things from people I don't follow.
Reddit is the worst. Completely public, I never followed any of these people. Ignoring/blocking individuals would have almost no effect.
100% agreed. And there is nothing funnier than seeing people on "team Twitter" excitedly tweeting about how "nothing of value was lost" without any sense of irony whatsoever.
To me, it's the difference between default private and default public. On both platforms you can curate your content, and arguably the worst content festers on Facebook because it is so hidden from the public eye, but it also means it doesn't have to find its way to you.
Facebook as a company has had much more problematic behavior, I'd agree with that one for sure.
But if there's anything we've learned from the past decade, it's the old axiom "sunlight is the best disinfectant" is completely and utterly wrong.
>Plus, a bunch of niche hobby groups I subscribed, full of very kind and constructive people.
This is the most underrated aspect. With the caveat that you can't choose your family and schoolfriends, you get the facebook you deserve. And you know, maybe you should try a bit harder to understand your family and schoolfriends?
I'm from the U.S. and your experience matches mine. I just have like 1 niece, 1 cousin and a friend or two that I had to unfollow. I'm still friends with them, I just don't see any of the political stuff they post.
I know some people have like 500+ friends or even the max of 5,000. I keep my friend list to the 250 people I know in real life that I want to keep in touch with. Probably still melting my brain but I'm convinced it's nice to keep up with people's lives.
I feel that way about Twitter. Lots of people in my feed complain about the baggage that dominates their feeds. Mine has none.
There is only one person who was bringing baggage (all men are terrible people, here is a never-ending stream of examples of what they do to make me so bitter) so I just muted them. Other than that person, the people who I've chosen to interact with don't bring these negative experiences, and hopefully appreciate that I likewise don't bring it to them.
Someone else in this thread posted a similar observation to some of the people in my Twitter feed. I personally think most people already know you can refuse to follow and can mute those who make for such negative experiences. If you participate in it, of course it's going to feel that way.
I'm in agreement that facebook is partly what you make it and experiences vary. My own experience has been generally positive; However I was a member of a niche interest group that used to be run on an old-school forum at its own domain. Over the years more and more content moved to the facebook group and there was roughly an even split when an accident by the web host lead to the total loss of the forum which could not be restored which meant all users now moved to the facebook group. The quality of material and the standard of discourse is shockingly worse on facebook than it was on the forums to the point where many interactions degrade into mudslinging. There shouldn't be too much difference between the forum/fb groups, but the only explanation I have come up with is that facebook's algorithm selects and displays content to people who would never have seen it on the forum, and some of them feel compelled to comment with either nasty or unhelpful input. On the forum I think the discovery of this content is self-directed and so only those with a genuine interest come across the post and interact with it, most others will just ignore the post title and scroll on, whereas facebook will show them the whole post with images and this makes them more likely to interact when they shouldn't. The other explanation is just that the mudslinging was always on the forum, but I did not come across it because it was not selected for me, but this goes both ways in that perhaps facebook is selecting "high-engagement" posts (with LOTS of argument) to display to me as well, thinking these will be of more interest. Whatever the cause, the difference is stark for this particular online community.
I suspect the original poster was not complaining about these topics showing up on their timeline; they don't want them showing up on anyone's timeline.
It can't show up on their timeline, mainly because they "Never had a Facebook" or "deleted their Facebook a day/month/year ago and it instantly made them better/happier/sexier"
Facebook is like a mirror. If you want to learn about yourself, look at your feed. If you see a bunch of political stuff, then it turns out that you had a weakness for political content. If you see a bunch of kittens, then you were overindexing in how you interacted with that content compared to alternatives.
It's not too different from alcohol. Two different people start drinking a lot of beer in college. One grows out of it, the other becomes an alcoholic. All things being same, the latter person had a more addictive personality and should have been more careful with alcohol.
To extend the alcohol analogy - some people wanted to prohibit it, but ultimately it's still here and it's just heavily regulated. You're not allowed to have it when you're young or when you're driving. Your friends will think poorly of you if you have too much of it too frequently. I wouldn't be surprised if social networks end up in a similar place.
If you are moderately famous, anything will be controversial.
You can say "water is good for you", and I can guarantee you that someone will reply with "actually, my friend drank too much water and died". Then, the drama would ensue.
it's the importance of curating your social media, twitter for me is basically just tech stuff, sometimes I see the edge of war when other tech people are involved, but mostly its all about cool things happening in tech. Facebook I've limited down a bit, I've mostly stopped looking at comments on news articles (really wish there was an option to remove the ability to see comments on some pages) other than that, its pretty good, except when friends engage in war. I'm also subscribed to some atheist groups, and those are super messy at times.
The thing is: if you ever engaged with political posts, facebook will make sure to show you political posts for the rest of your life, and the more likely to upset you, the better.
This. I actually unfriended and blocked all my personal contacts (not because I hate them, I was just removing my personal self from the platform) and then use it only for a bunch of amateur radio related groups which are largely very civil and helpful, good folks. For many, it's an easier-to--use groups.io.
It's the aggregate experience is and its influence on society that is more important than the experience of an individual user.
Twitter may seem like more of a war zone, and that's possible, but you have to actually measure things. I suspect the dark corners of Facebook are darker than Twitter, because Facebook is more siloed.
My experience on Facebook is the same, but I also have the same experience on Twitter. I follow really smart people who are in tech who have interesting things to say. That's all I see on Twitter.
Yep. I wouldn't say that there's no politics on my FB feed. But it's all either liberal or socialist -- because that's the consensus among my friends. And none of it is particularly nasty even when it falls out of that. It just doesn't get controversial.
Also, not from the US. From Canada.
Where I see the nastiness is when politics leaks into various hobby topic groups I'm on. And it's almost always Americans raising a stink (mad about masks, vaccines, "libtards" whatever)
Facebook is very far from perfect, but it brings a lot of good to the world as well. I met my partner of almost five years thanks to Facebook's friend recommendation algorithms. I had never met them outside of Facebook and we didn't have any friends in common outside Facebook either. In fact, when we met, we lived on opposite coasts.
I will always be grateful to Zuck & Co. for that, and for the hundreds of other friends I've made on Facebook - people of all ages, backgrounds, professions, and nationalities - people I never have, and almost certainly never WOULD have, met in "real" life. In my experience & opinion as an 8+ year high volume shitposter, Facebook is the best site in the world for dating and for expanding your social horizons/circle
And I say that as a former frontend lead at Ghostery, lol
I think the question is, how do you keep the good and get rid of the bad? I think there's a lot of great things that social media has done to connect people, but all too often it's only a shallow or artificial connection. I think the other problem is that social media will make you find people "like" you. Humans have always sought that out, but there was always some variance that allowed us to remember that others unlike us were still human. Now, with connections possible the world over, we ironically are more likely to only interact with individuals that share our opinions because it's a lot easier to find people like that when you can search the entire world for it. That leads to otherization of any who doesn't share that opinion. So, how do we create social media that keeps that potential for connection you are talking about, but does it in a meaningful way where individuals are exposed to more than an echo chamber?
Anyone capable of that level of introspection is unlikely to be someone who is on the wrong end of misinformation. If the solution is for everyone to identify misinformation and to block it, then the criticisms of social media platforms are legitimate. Only those who are the least likely to be effected would be the ones opting out.
We live in a world where nearly _all_ information fed to the public is misinformation. Except in one case it's due to FB and in another it's 5 dudes who own the entirety of US (and large chunk of the world's) "free" press. In this narrative-rich, (nearly) fact-free environment, aside from the obvious asinine bullshit that's easily seen through, the "misinformation" becomes simply something you don't agree with. The benefit of this is that it's no longer just 5 dudes that control the manufacturing of public consent. At a minimum it's 8 now (add Zuck, Pichai and Dorsey to the mix). With any luck, these 8 might start stabbing each other in the back.
There is a book called “Hate Inc.” by Matt Taibi in which the author inadvertently argues that manufacturing consent is no longer profitable and news outlets are now in the business of manufacturing dissent.
Well, whether they manufacture consent or dissent depends entirely on what party currently controls the White House and the Congress. So he's half-right. I'm a big fan of Taibbi's writing, and especially his books. "Griftopia" was pretty good, too. He's a rare breed - a liberal who is also willing to criticize liberals when they deserve it.
I don't use Facebook so I'm only going by what I've seen from screenshots or over someone's shoulder. Isn't one part of the misery political posts from people you do know? e.g., extended family or old friends going off the deep end?
I always think of one scene in Cool Runnings: a gold medal is a wonderful thing, and if you're not enough without it, there's no way you'll be enough with it.
Facebook gives you what you want, and it's up to you what you make that.
It’s just like YouTube. They need to tweak the algorithms for quality, not just quantity. Those are hard decisions for them because it will cost money in the short term. Ultimately governments will slap them down, which will cost much more.
If you keep up with current affairs the past few weeks have shown that FB’s alleged problems are supported by data which is disregarded by it’s leadership
Papers 1 and 3 are about correlating _duration_ of FB usage with happiness. Look at the papers referenced here [1] for the same effect as applied to TV. These papers, sans the new controversy over the mental health of young women on Instagram, _don't_ actually point to any stronger of a conclusion than "consuming large amounts of media is correlated with bad mental health".
I'm not saying that FB and this huge corporate capture of the internet is _good_, but making arguments like this doesn't actually make coherent sense.
This is a case where an anecdote is proof, at least a partial proof.
If the proposition is "Facebook brings at least some good to the world". A single confirmed anecdote of Facebook bringing a single good thing to the world is a proof. In the same way that all you need to prove that black sheep exist is to show a single black sheep.
The proposition is "Facebook brings a lot of good to the world" is a bit trickier, we need to define "a lot", but it can still be proven by "a lot" of anecdotes.
It is not a generality we are trying to prove, so we don't need to have data representative of the general case.
The part about Facebook being the best for dating is stated as a personal opinion.
Friend randoms and get to know them over time through public wall interactions; switch to DMs if things are clicking
I've sent thousands of FB friend requests to strangers suggested by the algo; the vast majority accept. I have met some of my favorite people in the world this way. Also some huge assholes/crazies, of course. Sometimes they are the same people
"Facebook is the best site in the world for dating and for expanding your social horizons/circle"
Maybe for boomers and some emerging markets. It appears to be losing popularity very fast among younger folks in most Western countries. Not that alternatives are much better IMO, Twitter in particular is even worse.
Nothing beats going out and talking to real people. It gives you a competitive advantage over the masses that are too lazy to socialize in real world.
I do think Facebook has something really valuable over in person interaction: you can observe how a potential SO interacts with a wide variety of other people
Also, I like that it's async. But that's more of a personal preference
It does feel nice, like the oppressor has died, at least for a bit. Also fun to watch the scramble to get it back online, would be nice if it never came back :)
There has been tons of use for it for hate, but people have found a way to use every method of communication for hate (e.g. TV, Mail, phones) and efforts to crack down on hate on Facebook haven’t seemed to have an effect on hate in the real world (see the people banned from Facebook who went on to use other platforms to coordinate 1/6). I don’t like their privacy intrusions but people seem to have a tendency to blame all of society’s ills on Facebook, phones, and the internet and that in and of itself is a massive oversimplification that doesn’t reflect the real issues with our society
I replied to your toplevel, which I make note of simply because I don't want to seem as if I'm targeting you.
You dislike their privacy intrusions, and I hate them for it. My life is actively made worse for their stalking, their insistence that they be at the forefront of all things social.
I agree that they're not to blame for the hatred in society, nor are they responsible for all of society's problems. But their utter contempt to just let people be is reason enough that I should make myself heard as often as I can, and especially whenever I see an attempt to relieve any amount of pressure that hopefully weighs on their conscience: fuck Facebook and their employees.
Yes people said the same thing about television and by and large most people think Television had some pretty bad side effects. A dumber society, all kinds of depression began manifesting in people who were sold an image of ‘reality’ via ads/unrealistic shows, the gutting of ‘journalism’ into 24-hour news, none of that stuff was wrong.
It's a multibillion dollar corporation that wants to track me wherever I go, whatever I do, whenever I want to connect. Facebook is a maniacal stalker. Their website is merely an innocuous facade that hides a nest of ugly, venomous, snakes.
There are thousands of others. Every week on here there's a new story about some new uncovered act of heinous evil from the Zuck and his buds. It's a wonder you haven't seen them.
> Can you point to the place on the doll where it hurt you?
Using a reference to how survivors of abuse are often required to re-enact their abuse to make a snarky comment is neither funny nor clever and it doesn’t add anything substantive to this conversation.
The problem for me, and many others, is we are friends with people on the complete opposite political spectrum. I don't have the granularity to block their political posts while still being able to see their regular posts.
This sounds more like an issue when it comes to interacting with those people in general, regardless of the medium. I bet those friends would still bring up their political views in irrelevant conversations irl, on twitter, or literally everywhere else they socialize.
This isn't a fault on the part of FB. You indicated you are friends with those people and want to follow their content. If you want to be friends with them on FB, but not see their content pop up on your timeline, that option is a click away. If you want more granular filtering, so that you can still see non-political posts from those people, you need to indicate to the algorithm that you want less of that by clicking "show me less posts like this", and it will eventually learn.
I see those options as a reasonable approach, as I struggle to come up with a better way to filter the content of people you follow with such granularity. The only option I can see in my mind that would work better is literally having someone work as your personal "filter", so that they can only show you the posts you want from those people. But that, obviously, is not a viable approach.
It's just like in real life. If you have a friend who you want to continue socializing with, but in public settings they say extremely off-putting things half the time that you don't want to hear, your options are to either stop socializing with them completely (aka unfollowing), to ask them to stop doing it, and that's pretty much it. All of those options are available on facebook as well, except facebook offers even more options that are all pretty good.
And I am saying this as someone who opens facebook at most once-twice a week for a little bit of time, just to check up on what my friends post and to read thru a few interesting discussions in the hobby groups I am in. If I occasionally see a wild political shitpost, I just click "show me less content like this". And the algorithm, surprisingly enough, tends to adjust to this pretty well.
If you went to a group meeting with them, even if you're talking to someone else you could potentially overhear the other friends talking to someone else about those political views, wouldn't you?
I just personally don't see this as a social media problem but I know it can definitely happen in real life (I've been that person listening to "friends" discuss views I don't agree with at an event/party/hangout).
Your experience must be very different from mine. My Facebook feed is full of interesting pictures from my friends. It's only when I visit HN that I find lots of hatred and bile... for Facebook.
It's like that scene in approximately 500,000 movies where, for just a moment, it is revealed that the immortal arch-villain actually has a weakness, and can be killed.
All the bad people still exist. Its not like fb the platform solely created them or that they will just go away if that particular platform disappeared.
So? Do you think its the only curated experience to maximize ad revenue on the internet (not to mention the non digital world).
If you want to argue underregulated capitalism is bad, by all means, but lets not pretend that there aren't hundreds of websites waiting to take facebook's place if fb's downtime went on for more than a few days.
The thing to remember about tech -- both when it's lionized as a revolution for the better or vilified as the source of evils making things worse -- is that most of the time what tech does is magnify existing human dynamics.
FB could do more to attenuate problems and better boost virtues, but it's not the source of the problems. Its absence won't solve them or prevent something equally bad (or worse) from filling any gap it might leave behind.
It’s relatively low friction to migrate to Signal or Telegram compared to a social network. I could said to family and friends stop using WA use that replacement with some success, but there is no migration for FB, Insta, YouTube…
I feel like we're singling out FB here. Can we bundle Twitter and Tiktok with it? May be Youtube comments? The danger of course is that we have all piled up on a scape goat and the rest of the social media companies will continue to enjoy great PR. Tiktok continues to be HN's darling.
What you are seeing is a major weakness of platforms like HN and Reddit. This weakness could very well cause more harm than Facebook, but studies or articles that point this out likely wouldn't receive exposure on the platforms they impugn.
We've seen the negative effects of this feedback loop in the past (who else remembers Reddit's role in the Boston Marathon bombing?), but it is clearly a much lower priority than the current Facebook witch hunt.
Television is a new medium where opinions are neither rare nor well done. (~~Anonymous from the 1930s, with many varieties)
It helps to remember that most new mediums follow the same trend: when its easier to share opinions, everyone is flabbergasted at the huge volume of "low quality" opinions.
I'd argue that the problem is much deeper than social media. It's the internet and we're acting surprised that giving a microphone to every human was not going to lead to angry mobs and echo-chambers of the scale the world has never seen. Then, we decided to clamp down on it, lose civil liberties and the ability to dissent. Comedians are apologizing for making people laugh - think about it. So we're overall worse off in terms of social civility than we were 30 years ago. I still believe that the internet has done more good than bad, but it's foolish to not acknowledge the shortcomings.
Are you familiar with the 1st Amendment, and the immediate backlash (aka: the Sedition act) passed almost immediately afterwards?
The printing press had the exact same issues as today's media, albeit at a slower pace but it was still there. A balance must be found.
A few decades ago, the balance people liked was that newspapers were free to say anything, but if something was untruthful, then people could sue newspapers (providing a strong incentive for newspapers to remain truthful). I don't think it was a perfect system, but it was better than what we have today for sure.
The issue is that we haven't figured out what the new system should be. (If someone posts misinformation on Facebook or more commonly: false-information on Google Reviews / Amazon Reviews / Yelp reviews: who do you sue?). Heck, people seem to have entirely forgotten the first 150+ years of American history with the 1st Amendment and how we settled upon the libel / slander laws.
People don't really care about the national-level discussion. National level is abstract and doesn't really affect our day-to-day lives. But ask people about how misleading Yelp reviews or Amazon reviews have hurt (or helped) them, and you can tell that people are incredibly jaded about this "Free information" online.
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I don't know what the new system should be. But the 1st step is to acknowledge that at all points of our history, we've had freedoms AND we've had problems associated with those freedoms. We want the "good stuff" associated with free communication, but we must work our best to clamp down on the "evil stuff".
I don't think anyone disagrees upon "evil stuff" of free speech: doxing, swatting, "fake news" / "misinformation", etc. etc. Both sides pretty much agree upon the realities of today's media (the right calls it "Fake News", the left calls it "misinformation". Come on, its not like we're that far apart on the matter).
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In any case: take solace in history. The 1st Amendment vs Sedition Acts were the big debate in the late 1700s. Its not like the discussion was ever resolved: we just had different political powers swing free-speech one way, and then swing enforcement the other way (ex: Office of Censorship during WW2).
I've recently realized that a lot of the crap on Facebook comes from this ambiguity.
They've basically created a system where it is very hard for anyone to take responsibility. Case in point: New articles posted on FB tend to have very low quality comments, almost as a rule. For pages that post these articles, it is extremely difficult for them to "moderate" those comments, in order to enforce high quality discussions. In fact, their is a lot of pressure on those pages to not enforce quality commenting. It is hard to say, even, that the organizations who post new articles are even responsible for creating a positive community around their Facebook posts.
Contrast this with the "old way" that newspaper brought in reader voices: Through letters to the editor. No matter whether or not you agreed with the opinions, these letters were (and are), of a completely different caliber than the typical FB comment. The newspapers willingly published them, and, in a sense, took responsibility for them. Namecalling, slander, misinformation, etc are mostly (though not always) filtered out of letters published by newspapers.
Compare this, too, to a forum like Hacker News. Here, we have a steady moderator who enforces the rules, and that the community also helps enforce. The rules are clear enough. Low quality discourse is discouraged, and sometimes even removed. There is someone whose job it is to maintain the quality of discussions. On the comments on a Facebook page, that almost never happens, neither from FB or from the company hosting the page.
As has happened through the history of online forums, without decent moderation, things tend to devolve very quickly. This is exactly what's happened at Facebook. They've created "pages" that could be there responsibility, or could be the responsibility of the people running the page, but nobody really takes responsibility. Everything, instead, is focused on engagement. Publishers want to drive traffic to their websites. FB wants to keep people on the site, and "engaged" with their advertisements. Moderation, in essence, has been almost completely ignored.
If you feel that Facebook is really that detrimental to your online existence, there are easier (and more persistent) ways for you to block them out of your life.
I'm seeing an unusual amount of reddit style small comments on this outage, which I find strange. They're short and in the vein of "Facebook is down: good" or "Facebook is back up: damn nothing good lasts forever"
I understand the distain for Facebook as a business, but still this is pretty low effort.
Maybe it's because Facebook has become more than a business and has wormed its way into places where it has no business being?
A ton of small city governments in the US do announcements and such on Facebook these days. One columnist is advocating giving the a seats at the United Nations, and does not get immediately laughed out of the room by the editor [1].
It's really hard to practically escape their reach, all the "How I left Facebook and it was really great" posts notwithstanding. Being digital Henry David Thoreaus is not a scalable strategy.
So I tend to take the low effort comments as a visceral articulation of the relief felt at knowing that the platform and the conspiracy theories and such spreading on it are...gone, albeit only temporarily.
I must confess that I myself felt this kind of relief. I secretly hoped that it would stay down; and that we'd get to rebuild a kinder, more honest, and open social media platform or platforms.
>So I tend to take the low effort comments as a visceral articulation of the relief felt at knowing that the platform and the conspiracy theories and such spreading on it are...gone, albeit only temporarily.
That's funny, because most of what I read while Facebook was down was conspiracy theories about Facebook being down.
In the UK the COVID vaccine was offered nationally through a government site but you could get it sooner and closer through local GPs. They could stop once they had covered the old and vulnerable though. In my area, they carried on for a while but only if you requested an appointment in the comments of a private Facebook group.
I wasn't thrilled by the delay, but also thought the assumption of vaccine hesitancy from others in the meantime and hard to navigate process could put some off entirely.
Yes, I saw Facebook being a gateway (and a potential roadblock) to requesting vaccines from some US pharmacies last year as well. You had to post in the comments to reserve one or make an appointment.
And how simple it actually was, just turn off the sites. Like a giant global, societal parental control setting.
Here I thought that this snake had wrapped itself entirely around all of us, but it really didn’t. All we have to do is ‘flick’, turn it off. Body image issues on Insta? Not today kids.
How simple some of our biggest problems are to solve. It does make one hopeful.
Sure, this might be true but you're diverting from the point OP is making. May be it's that HN has lost it's ability to have a civil discourse without people downvoting you for the slightest challenging opinion, let alone contrarian viewpoints (which would be flagged). It used to be not like that just two years ago. It is very much reflecting a low effort echo-chamber.
> Sure, this might be true but you're diverting from the point OP is making.
I don't see how? OP is saying that the low-effort comments are more frequent on this post than on other HN posts ("...an unusual amount of reddit style small comments on this outage"). I'm agreeing with that assertion, and positing a possible explanation for it ("people felt a fundamental sort of relief, and expressed it through offhand comments").
Your assertion, on the other hand, seems to be that these low-effort comments are present on all posts – which seems to me to be, if anything, more of a diversion from OP's point of view.
> Your assertion, on the other hand, seems to be that these low-effort comments are present on all posts – which seems to me to be, if anything, more of a diversion from OP's point of view.
Don't put words in my mouth and this is not what I said. I just see this as an ad hominem attack, ironically diverting the criticism of HN (a factual observation in my view) towards my persons and my ulterior motives.
The public is tired of being gaslighted and lied to by large corporations.
The whistle-blower only brought to light what we have known previously, Facebook is a net loss for humanity.
Letting people contect with family and long lost friends is good.
Purposefully pitting people against each other, human experimentation https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/06/28/facebook... , creating hateful echo chambers, claiming to be the source of all facts, manipulating users for engagement and ad revenue is bad.
The low effort posts could signify a loss of cultural cohesion or new accounts, but Facebook and its children fading from the public would be a gift to many addicts.
In Germany, each year a committee of linguists select an "un-word of the year". "Gaslit" should be the internet unword of the decade. It has no scientific relevance and shouldn't be used when perfectly fine alternatives like "lied to" or "manipulated" exist. They just don't sound as dramatic I guess.
I agree that the misuse is annoying-- and a Lot of people misuse the word. However, gaslighting has a specific meaning not quite covered by "lied to" or "manipulated".
> Letting people contect with family and long lost friends is good.
Maybe it's overall good, maybe it's over the top and not super. Even if it is good, the existence of Facebook presents a block for better and healthier ways developing for them to connect.
Yes, and as a submission I don't really see the point in it? Especially when it's not even a status page permalink (couldn't be, that was down too apparently). Post mortems very welcome of course. It's just karma bait as far as I can tell, and as you say, almost entirely uninteresting comments.
There are/were a couple of other at least briefly front page submissions around it of e.g. twitter/reddit potentially-leaked minor bits of info, and krebsonsecurity post; I'm sure the few informed more interesting comments would've found their way to those without a 'it is down, here is a link that will soon be up again' mega-thread.
Which leads me to a meta-point on this submission: I've flagged it, because AIUI it's customary that the initial 'down' submission gets renamed 'was down', rather than having the two 'down'/'up' threads.
Useless comments don’t make the topic being discussed useless to know about. This outage has arguably impacted more human lives than any other in computing history. I can’t back that up with facts yet, but you must agree it is a notable event for this community that has had ripples across the internet and real life.
Sure, that seems a bit dramatic, but basically sure; I did say the other contentful posts are fine of course IMO, there's a blog post from Cloudflare now too, it's just the initial [x is down](currently dead link) posts that I don't like/see a need for.
99% they just get used as 'is it just me' checks, and there are dedicated sites for that.
Did HN kill signups during this outage? They used to turn off signups when reddit went down a while back, not sure if this practice is still in place or not.
i was shocked to see videogamedunkey on the front page of hackernews a few weeks ago. there is a huge influx of redditors in the past year and a half. why do you think the admins introduced classic mode? its because they are acutely aware of this, despite constant denials, and are trying to prevent the site from becoming, well, facebook eventually. full of LCD.
This is a live event unfolding and that’s pretty much all there’s to it. So it’s like a twitch chat. Deeper discussions will follow when the postmortems come out
There are probably lots of people who have Facebook addiciton and need help. For some reason they channel their hate towards Facebook instead of themselves.
A little bit of Internet history just happened — has so much traffic ever stopped and started in such a short period of time?
Somewhere, one more happily undulating circadian egress graph just had a whopping exponential decay chunk taken out of it. How close to 0 did it get? What void lies below the graph? Elder gods? Blank packetless skree? The Great Quiet? We may never know — it’s noisy again now and will never get quieter.
Long may these events continue. The Internet was never meant to work all the time, it was meant to take a pummelling, say whatever, and carry on regardless.
No, you're not the only one, I noticed the same thing. In fact, immediately after reading and checking that FB is up I came back to the HN tab, reload it and it was way faster compared to a few minutes ago when FB was still down.
That doesn't mean something else is going on. It means that there are a lot of us who are web addicts who were temporarily deprived of our Zucker-smack and desperately flailed about in the rest of the web for a fix until our main dose got restored.
From a cloudflare blog post on this, their public DNS resolvers were getting 30x their usual traffic. Presumably that was the case for DNS resolvers everywhere, so that would explain a slowdown:
> But that's not all. Now human behavior and application logic kicks in and causes another exponential effect. A tsunami of additional DNS traffic follows.
> This happened in part because apps won't accept an error for an answer and start retrying, sometimes aggressively, and in part because end-users also won't take an error for an answer and start reloading the pages, or killing and relaunching their apps, sometimes also aggressively.
...
> So now, because Facebook and their sites are so big, we have DNS resolvers worldwide handling 30x more queries than usual and potentially causing latency and timeout issues to other platforms.
Edit: Although looking at the graph on that page, it appears that only DNS requests for FB properties increased 30x, so that last sentence appears to be misleading. Regardless, a significant overall increase.
As for why, you'd have to ask them. It could be to allow for relatively quick DNS failover in the case of an outage. Or if using a proxy like Cloudflare, that provider could prefer short DNS TTLs to have flexibility in their routing.
Cloudflare and similar companies only work if the TTL is very short. If they set it to some infinite number, they wouldn't be do even the most basic load balancing at the global scale in which they operate.
Surely the moment facebook comes back up would be higher traffic as people rush to comment on it (see this thread's rapid rise).
Best guess: there's a DNS dependency in HN's critical path somewhere and the DNS server they used was being hammered with the facebook dns lookup retries.
Lots of facebook employees with nothing to do. We have this impression of HN being a huge internet property because of the importance of the news here in our lives, but in the great scheme of things, probably it has pretty modest traffic. 60.000 more people hammering it probably is a good load.
All the devices on the planet with Facebook owned apps installed having no concept of backoff retries and people constantly refreshing trying to figure out why Facebook isn't loading was pegging the crap out of DNS resolvers, slowing down queries for other legitimate requests too.
Once they came back online and their DNS was resolving, it alleviated all that pressure.
I did a little testing while Facebook was down. I copied an HN frontpage request from the network traffic tab in chrome’s developer console. Using the ‘copy as curl’ option, you get a fully formatted curl request in your clipboard that makes all of the headers and protocols of the original browser request.
I then executed that request in the terminal. This request was met with the same ~5 second delay I was seeing with my browser. Front and center was my authentication cookie in the header, so I removed that from the command and the request was normal in response time (extremely fast in HN’s case). I put the cookie back, it was slow, I took the cookie out it was fast. I did this 4-5 times until i was satisfied that was it.
The delay could have been due to upstream dependencies on DNS, extra load on the authenticated request pipelines, some Facebook subterfuge in the bowels of HN or just an extremely unusual syncopation in the patterns of the universe.
But clearly the authenticated requests were slow and the unauthenticated ones were not.
Maybe HN servers share room with something that got pinned down with requests when FB was down? E.g. 100000s of devices doing a login retry loop for some app since FB auth. doesn't work, or something.
Probably Facebook trackers. I noticed a lot of apps (including my own) having major slowness on initial load while they were down. My assumption is it was their tracking code timing out.
It was probably due to the global DNS system being overloaded due to people and apps repeatedly retrying facebook connections. Cloudflare reported 30x normal DNS requests for FB properties.
Well, these days server side api… er Conversions API is the way to go. This way if the user blocks the browser pixel the data can still be acquired for certain events, say a purchase. Google Tag Manager server side has something similar.
Hit F12 on your browser and look at the network traffic. HN only loads a handful of files: the html page, a style sheet, a JavaScript file and a few GIFs for the arrows and faveicon.
The JS is uncompressed and very readable. It only contains logic for site use, no code to call back some other trackers.
A perfect example of site that doesn't need to use client-side analytics to sell ads.
Facebook, unlike other big tech companies, has no financial incentive to share postmortems. Others are bound by SLA agreements with business customers.
Well, as someone that has an app that had degraded performance due to their SDK failing to talk to Facebook servers. I FOR ONE would really like an explanation.
Then collaborate with your peers to get enough leverage over Facebook to demand this.
It’s not like FB’s market position let’s them dictate terms in an unfair way that would require a certain governing force to step in and rebalance the tables……
Allegedly, this was a BGP update gone wrong that locked out their remote access. And the people with physical access didn't have the necessary privileges to fix the issue.
Wow, I never realized Facebook was causing so much psychological discomfort in so many people. Either we are using different Facebooks or you guys need therapy and do not track plugin.
Instagram, Facebook and messenger working for me. Whatsapp still down though, for me anyway. Cant like or comments posts. I get this message in dev tools: "A server error field_exception occured."
Even if it was only a few hours things have significantly improved in my life in the period it went down. Zero anti-vax spam from FB sent to me via texts from older relatives.
At risk of continuing the devolution of this thread, anti-vax != "Republicans bad". Disingenuous false equivalence. One is the pinnacle of dangerous, malicious misinformation and the other is just a political opinion held by some that is at worst reductionistic
As much as I dislike Facebook, my father died yesterday and listening to some of the relatively unknown folk musicians that he had shared on there over the years meant a lot to me today.
It's the billions of people who have been trying to use it all day logging in and trying to update their feeds and catch up on what they missed that's slowing it down, not the small city of nerds clicking the title through HN. Facebook (and subsidiaries like Instagram hosted in the same DCs) normally receive more requests per minute than HN receives in a month.
Hopefully some enterprising ransomware gang can do the world a service and encrypt all of FB's data for them, possibly upgrade all of their servers and backups to being /dev/null hosts entirely.
A politician decides to run on the platform of getting rid of social media and/or breaking up big tech.
Big tech has not only the money to run attack ads 24/7, they also have access to all your embarrassing photos, location history, drunk texts, searches, etc, so more than enough ammo to make even a saint look like a sleazeball.
The way to destroy Facebook and the likes of it, is not by encrypting all of its data or even parts of it or sending it to /dev/null.
The best attack would be in fact to display war footage from Syria, the Collateral Damage video and such gore to random people at random times, instead of ads perhaps. And to the other side who wouldnt mind the violence and gore, show them pornhub clips.
This is a bit extreme, but I'm of the opinion that it's literally impossible to act immorally against Facebook. It would be unfortunate if this were to happen. Ultimately, whatever is good for the goose is good for the gander, and there's no worthier goose than the razing of Facebook et al.
Does HN have any Facebook integrations that could have caused the slowness seen earlier? Or it could be that some part of the network infrastructure is shared between the two and was overloaded.
I just tried to open a hacker news link and go redirected to Facebook login page. A friend trying to open a ‘Facebook is up’ Twitter tread got the same login page. Anyone else?
I just tried to open a hacker news link and go redirected to Facebook login page. A friend trying to open a ‘Facebook is up’ Twitter tread got the same login page. Anyone else?
Did this have any impact on Occulus users? I know the big Facebook login controversy -- this might have been a good example of why that's a horrible idea.
However, most multiplayer games did not work and those that did could not get your username.
And for some reason games failed to appear in libraries for the first 10-15 minutes after starting a Quest, the entries for the games just didn't appear.
Some features, like adding new posts or uploading photos are having problems. You can likely read your feed now, but updates will be wonky for some hours to come.
That's a pretty ignorant statement. Facebook and its services, especially Whatsapp, are the most widespread form of communication in many countries. Particularly in poor/developing countries, hardly anything else is used because mobile Internet is available cheaply, unlike voice services and SMS. Whatsapp is indispensable there.
That’s an amazingly ignorant statement. A lot of the value of WhatsApp at acquisition time was that it supported a ton of feature phones and J2ME, something largely ignored in the West. You can have open source all you want but someone still has to run infra.
It's time to decentralize and open up the Internet again, as it once was (ie. IRC, NNTP and other open protocols) instead of relying on commercial entities (Google, Facebook, Reddit, Amazon) to control our data and access to it.
A website to be in touch with your friends by keeping a list of them and sharing pictures, texts and events, which is famous for its developers discovering that the worse it does its core functions, the more money it brings, where people are forced to spend more time to do simple things because UI is intentionally bad and AI mixes in the content it founds the most distracting into your feed together with ads.
1. Since all internal comms runs through email, messenger, and other systems all run under facebook.com, communication and coordination must have been extremely difficult.
2. eBGP servers/appliances that can serve 3 billion users must take a while to spin up. Assuming there was no cache, it would have to register thousands of internal services.
3. Per a now deleted reddit thread, the people who pushed the change and knew how to fix it weren't able to be onsite at the data center, so they were flying blind and working with lower level techs trying to implement their instructions.
4. DNS is usually heavily cached at multiple layers, but today they were getting DDOS'ed with DNS requests from FB clients. They would probably have to block those requests while the service is coming online so it doesn't just melt down again, and have some method of slowly allowing requests. How? IDK. Maybe host by host.
5. Whatever the case, some of the world's most sophisticated, highest paid engineers were under the gun to solve at $3000/second problem. I have to assume they were working as fast as they could.
1. Get physical access to the systems; employee badges were also offline, so they needed to bring in a different set of people with physical access to the premises.
2. Login directly to their systems and update the A-name record.
3. A-name records do not take effect immediately. There's a propagation delay as other DNS services accept the domain name.
4. Any sort of "damage assessment" to check the conditions of the now-offline systems. [Not a gating factor; you can turn things on, but you are likely doing "blast radius" analysis in parallel.]
5. Restart services one-by-one. Web servers, databases, API gateways, etc.
6. Allow external access; turn the systems back on for the world. [This is where they are currently, even though some parts of Facebook do not seem to be working too well. i.e., uploads and new posts seem broken still; at least they were for me.]
It doesn’t sound to me like this was a DNS outage. Their records existed but their name servers were unreachable because they’d withdrawn their BGP route. So I don’t think the rest of your comment is really consistent with the available information.
