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I have visited a local community center event website for 15 years. They recently moved over to Facebook. Their feed is public. If I don't have the FB app or am
by greg___ 11y ago
I have visited a local community center event website for 15 years. They recently moved over to Facebook. Their feed is public. If I don't have the FB app or am not logged into FB, it's almost as if there is an entire division of losers, sitting around at Facebook cooking up ways to make me login or install the app. From are you a robot unreadable captcha's, to denying the page exists, to limiting the number of posts, limiting readable post content, its ridiculous.
Whether they are king or not, all I am ever going to remember them for is taking a gigantic shit over what the Internet is supposed to mean.
- artursapek 11y agoI tried viewing the Facebook page for my local goban meetup recently to check on a schedule, and FB put a giant floating translucent white box over the bottom half of my screen with a single "login" button in the middle of it. So I could see there was content below but it was incredibly hard to read. There was not even an "X" button to close it. What it was saying was "join our website or get the hell out". I understand enforcing login for write operations, since it's obviously required, but they really do seem to have no regard for the original ideals of the internet. They're not alone; Quora and others have done similarly stupid shit. These companies are all supposedly started by hackers who love the internet and technology, but it's sad to see capitalism take hold in such an ugly way.
- wlesieutre 11y agoI've found Kill Sticky [1] to be an incredibly useful bookmarket lately. It finds any DOM element with "position: fixed" and deletes it. Wish I didn't need to use it so often, but here we are. Sometimes for annoying popups covering content, sometimes for the sidebar of brightly colored floating social widgets, sometimes just the enormous fixed banner that continues to waste screen real estate after you've scrolled down. I use it a lot on my laptop and haven't tried JS bookmarklets in mobile browsers, but I'd hope that they work by now? [1] https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/ https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/
- endemic 11y agoThat is brilliant. For Mobile Safari, copy the bookmarklet source, create a "dummy" bookmark, then go back and edit it. Delete the URL and type in `javascript:` and paste the JS.
- unexistance 11y agobookmarklet(s) LIVES :D thanks for this, will be added shortly p/s: we need more bookmarklets that removes annoyance like this
- renaudg 11y agoEven for read operations : forcing you to log in is the only way Facebook has to enforce the non-public privacy setting the content creator may have set. Conversely, anyone with or without an account can view public Facebook posts.
- artursapek 11y agoThis wasn't them respecting a privacy setting. The content was still very accessible, just inconveniently so.
- rpgmaker 11y ago> These companies are all supposedly started by hackers who love the internet and technology I think the word hacker was misappropriated by assholes in Silicon Valley somewhere around the mid-aughts.
- tomc1985 11y agoThe original hacker ethic was opposed to suits! http://www.hacker-dictionary.com/terms/suit http://www.hacker-dictionary.com/terms/suit
- kobayashi 11y ago>original ideals of the internet original ideals of the _World Wide Web_, to be more specific.
- sreyaNotfilc 11y agoPinterest does this as well. Its lame but effective. Supply and Demand is an amazing concept. If FB or Pinterest wasn't as popular/needed then this type of activity would be frowned upon.
- mineshaftgap 11y agoZuckerberg is the next Ellison, don't anthropomorphize him.
- ljk 11y agosadly the "closed garden" concept is the trend these days..
- justinzollars 11y agodays? I would say years.
- ChrisClark 11y agoYeah, that's actually what that expression means.
- return0 11y agoGrowth was crucial in the early days of facebook. They were laser focused on growth, because they knew they had to move fast to destroy all the competition. Now it's retention which is extremely crucial for them. As soon as users start leaking, there is no going back.
- RickS 11y ago>it's almost as if there is an entire division..., sitting around at Facebook cooking up ways to make me login or install the app that is exactly correct
- dave2000 11y agoWhy don't you just create an account for this sort of thing. No baby pictures, no sharing your holiday photos, no commenting on friends/families/colleagues posts. Just accessing groups/sites who use it because it's an extremely cost effective way of getting an internet presence. I used to be just like you but relented in the end because of Facebook messenger (yeah, could use email but people can't generally be bothered with that any more).
- vskarine 11y agoThe problem is that they force you to use your real identity.
- dave2000 11y agoThey would never know. They don't let you use it if you're under 13; there are probably tens of millions of children using it.
- facetube 11y agoUntil someone doesn't like one of your posts and reports your account as a fake. Then it gets locked and they make you scan your drivers license and send it in. I've seen this happen to people who do things as innocuous as put a nickname between their first and last name.
- dave2000 11y agoSure, but then you create another fake account. In any event, my original suggestion was for people who simply wanted to silently join groups to read info, and/or avoid annoying login requests.
- tim333 11y agoWhich is not always a bad thing. It allows comments on community websites without getting most spam, trolls, sexist abuse and so on. Which is a large part of why things like community websites have moved there.
- sosborn 11y agoThe problem isn't Facebook. The problem is that the community center decided that maintaining a website wasn't worth the cost and/or the effort.
- CodeCube 11y agoor maybe it's a failure of tech in general that maintaining a website isn't worth the cost and/or the effort ;) That was a glib remark, but in all seriousness ... for the average non-technical user, who's friends are all on Facebook, their event and group system is a godsend. Non-FB solutions should realize that and figure out ways to make more accessible (and cheap ... aka free) systems
- ghaff 11y agoSquarespace is apparently pretty popular for small websites and it's not especially expensive--but it's not free and I appreciate that the difference between free and $10-20/month is a big difference for a community group or other small non-commercial organization/individual that just wants a page up on the Web.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- Shenxi 11y agoYes, and Facebook users are not aware that they are paying for Facebook, so the price comparison is brutal.
- CodeCube 11y agoMany parts of the general populace don't care about the whole "if you're not paying, you're the product" mentality. They happily ignore as many ads as you want to throw at them, as long as they can coordinate little timmy's birthday party. The world is complicated :)
- kobayashi 11y ago
- forrestthewoods 11y agoWhat is the Internet supposed to be mean? Because if the FB site for your community center is able to reach more community members through FB than on their own that's kind of awesome. A free service is making your community a better place!
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 11y agoPlease stop perpetuating the myth that it's free, it's not.
- forrestthewoods 11y agoNo.
- prawn 11y agoCommunities are choosing to use it largely because it's free, so I think it's fair to use the term in this context.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 11y agoNo, communities are choosing it because they think it's free. That's exactly why perpetuating the myth is such a bad idea. Just because people think that it is, doesn't make it so.
- prawn 11y agoIt is free to them. It literally costs them no money. That's why they're choosing it. They're not fussed about the cost to their users. (I don't use Facebook and don't like when communities build on Facebook.)
- renaudg 11y agoIt is just as free to use as any other website with ads is.