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> Fun fact: you cannot block Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook. It just won't let you. This was fixed months ago (and was a technical problem that affected anyone bl

by spicyj 9y ago

> Fun fact: you cannot block Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook. It just won't let you. This was fixed months ago (and was a technical problem that affected anyone blocked by many thousands of people, not just him). It wasn't intended.

kerng 9y ago
>> It wasn't intended. We have been hearing the "it's a bug" a lot lately from Facebook.
- marricks 9y ago
  Agreed. I think they've pretty much used up their plausible deniability quota for the year, or decade...
  - mschuster91 9y ago
    Facebook, however, has a massive codebase. Their app is easily one of the biggest Android apps, in fact it's so huge they repeatedly (?) had to hack the Android runtime environment to allow it to run. Their backend and frontend code is likely also a huge monster. In addition they're doing ML/AI stuff which is even harder to debug.
    - marricks 9y ago
      You’re implying their ML/AI interefered with Mark’/ dislike button? Bit of a stretch.
      - mschuster91 9y ago
        > You’re implying their ML/AI interefered with Mark’/ dislike button? I don't imply it, but given how many spam filters these days are realized as more-or-less-black boxes, it is a plausible theory. In addition, at least for Twitter and FB, there has been suspicion for long time that reports/blocks have faster consequences when many people report/block, as automated filters take over before a human can look at it. I can imagine that there is a filter that gets triggered when a user gets N reports/blocks in M minutes, with e.g. N=100 and M=30, to automatically flag users as potential spammers, unsolicited nude senders or whatever. This had hit Zuckerbergs account, the spam filter blocked his account... and then someone was tasked with preventing this, by disabling the block function based upon certain criteria. Also, the bug seems to have affected only users blocked by thousands of people. Not exactly your usual testcase, and I don't know if I'd have thought of this scenario when writing the test specifications.
        kerng 9y ago
        You are assuming that there are test specifications - in many organizations thorough testing before shipping is a thing of the past. A/B and testing in production is the new norm unfortunately. That's probably part of the problem. Since the users are the product being tested it makes even sense.
danso 9y ago
Ha! That is actually the kind Of technical quirk I can believe. Maybe because I so rarely use the block feature myself that I assume others must also unused it very rarely, and that few users are ever blocked (since the previous paradigm was opt-in following).

by spicyj 9y ago

kerng 9y ago

>> It wasn't intended. We have been hearing the "it's a bug" a lot lately from Facebook.

marricks 9y ago
Agreed. I think they've pretty much used up their plausible deniability quota for the year, or decade...
- mschuster91 9y ago
  Facebook, however, has a massive codebase. Their app is easily one of the biggest Android apps, in fact it's so huge they repeatedly (?) had to hack the Android runtime environment to allow it to run. Their backend and frontend code is likely also a huge monster. In addition they're doing ML/AI stuff which is even harder to debug.
  - marricks 9y ago
    You’re implying their ML/AI interefered with Mark’/ dislike button? Bit of a stretch.
    - mschuster91 9y ago
      > You’re implying their ML/AI interefered with Mark’/ dislike button? I don't imply it, but given how many spam filters these days are realized as more-or-less-black boxes, it is a plausible theory. In addition, at least for Twitter and FB, there has been suspicion for long time that reports/blocks have faster consequences when many people report/block, as automated filters take over before a human can look at it. I can imagine that there is a filter that gets triggered when a user gets N reports/blocks in M minutes, with e.g. N=100 and M=30, to automatically flag users as potential spammers, unsolicited nude senders or whatever. This had hit Zuckerbergs account, the spam filter blocked his account... and then someone was tasked with preventing this, by disabling the block function based upon certain criteria. Also, the bug seems to have affected only users blocked by thousands of people. Not exactly your usual testcase, and I don't know if I'd have thought of this scenario when writing the test specifications.
      - kerng 9y ago
        You are assuming that there are test specifications - in many organizations thorough testing before shipping is a thing of the past. A/B and testing in production is the new norm unfortunately. That's probably part of the problem. Since the users are the product being tested it makes even sense.

danso 9y ago

Ha! That is actually the kind Of technical quirk I can believe. Maybe because I so rarely use the block feature myself that I assume others must also unused it very rarely, and that few users are ever blocked (since the previous paradigm was opt-in following).