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Twitter’s deletion of its FB app caused old cross-posts to temporarily disappear
- th0ma5 8y agoThe other direction seems unaffected from my own cursory look around. I.e. Facebook posts still can become Tweets seemingly, although that may be from these people's third party tools.
- Alex3917 8y agoThis 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 material they've created to communicate with the voters in their districts.
- bittercynic 8y agoI think it would be a very smart move to plan for all of those things to happen.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- MBCook 8y agoNo, 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 this was allowed in the first place, or at least not removed many years ago.
- JoshTriplett 8y ago> No, it’s the equivalent of get hub deciding to remove all the code that you automatically re-post from SourceForge. People do regularly mirror repositories to github, and there'd be serious problems if github prevented that or somehow tried to force you to have your github repository as the "canonical" home of your project.
- MBCook 8y agoHonestly it’s not a great analogy because GitHub and SourceForge exist to promote cooperation and open code. That’s not really what Facebook is for, it’s not supposed to be ANOTHER place to find your tweets. I’m trying to come up with a better analogy but I’m not doing very good.
- skj 8y ago"Facebook's mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together."
- MBCook 8y agoYes. On Facebook. They want people to login and use Facebook. Auto posting tweets so that people can use Twitter and still appear to be on Facebook doesn’t help that mission.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- sakisv 8y agoIt does help them build a better profile for that specific user though. Facebook was not losing by this. If someone had connected their Twitter account, it meant they cared enough so they would be visiting Facebook, even if it was sporadically to check how their posts were doing and to see the necessary ads.
- 8y ago
- nradov 8y agoI find it impossible to sympathize with anyone who considers social media a "job".
- 8_hours_ago 8y agoWhy so? Do you think marketing is not a real job?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- roywiggins 8y agoIt's PR, but on the web. Unless PR is also not a job?
- AndrewKemendo 8y agoIn my estimation Noam Chomsky has the best take on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ET_at6tPlsE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ET_at6tPlsE
- draw_down 8y agoJesus. Please fuck off.
- com2kid 8y agoLots of companies use social media as an outreach channel to their readers and users. From Tmobile's offering of tech support over Twitter, to live tweets of news events by journalists in the field. I can guarantee you, every large corporation has a social media team, possibly a sizeable one, and the people working there are kept very busy.
- smsm42 8y agoExcept for Github, every person using it has a copy of the repo and they can restore it. But for Facebook, only Facebook has the copy, and if it's deleted you're done. That's why Facebook is a terrible social platform, at least for social interactions that happen more than in one minute. Older social sites - like forums, etc. - had archives, could be backed up, etc. - but on Facebook, not only you can't properly hold a discussion, but everything you wrote can be removed at any time without any notice.
- dewey 8y agoI guess it’s not that big of a deal as there’s basically no interaction on past posts and not many people scroll down to see olds posts.
- droopybuns 8y agoI’m having a hard time caring about the policies of either of these terrible companies.
- geomark 8y agoOr the people who rely on them.
- magic_beans 8y agoWho "relies" on cross-posted tweets?
- RodgerTheGreat 8y agoMarketers, advertisers, social media consultants.
- em500 8y agoI’m having a hard time caring about any one of these.
- bobbyadamson 8y agoApparently a bunch of people considering how mad everyone seems to be about this.
- Spivak 8y agoI mean we're in a forum of people who would absolutely use one social network and automate mirroring to others. Doubt very few normal people even knew the feature existed. This change pretty much affects spammers, social media managers, and powerusers -- exactly the kind of people you probably don't want to interact with anyway on social media.
- dang 8y agoMaybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.
- shawn 8y agoMake your own website and you won’t have to worry about this. I’m mostly joking. Who makes their own websites anymore? Frustrating seeing users caught in the crossfire of policy updates for tech giants.
- pmichalina 8y agoIsn’t this how the web was supposed to work?
- MBCook 8y agoIf only all this removed content already existed somewhere else. Like a different extremely popular social network. Like the one all the content was actually posted on originally. I guess I don’t see why this is such a big deal other than as a generic opportunity to be mad at Facebook.
- raphaelrk 8y agoI and many others I know post tweets and have them cross posted to Facebook. They get relatively little attention on Twitter, the likes and comments from friends on Facebook was what made them meaningful. Those likes and comments are gone now. It feels sort of like Facebook came and ripped pages out of my diary.
- kenjackson 8y agoCurious, why use Twitter to post them if they get little attention on Twitter
- nordsieck 8y ago> Make your own website and you won’t have to worry about this. GAE/Github + Hugo is remarkably friendly and low maintenance.
- aikah 8y ago> GAE/Github + Hugo is remarkably friendly and low maintenance. And how do you make your static blog social? No Mastodon and other decentralized networks are the real alternative to Twitter,Facebook, Reddit and co.
- AdamTReineke 8y agoHoly shit... Literally ten years of Facebook posts and people's comments on them just up and disappeared from my profile. How is that ok?
- magic_beans 8y agoBecause Facebook can do whatever it wants??
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y agoI'm not sure why you were downvoted for this. It's right there in their ToS.
- phito 8y agoIt's crazy the amount of people who think Facebook owes them something If you are really that attached to your Facebook page then do a backup. If you really think it's unacceptable that Facebook can do whatever they want with your data (and they can), just don't use it.
- mb_72 8y agoHopefully it's just a 'soft' delete, and this can be undone. I can't imagine FB actually hard-deleting any information that might help them in terms of ads etc.
- chasing 8y agoHuh. Weird to retroactively pull content out of my feed. Now there's just, like, one post from all of 2018. Reveals to both me and the world that I don't actually really use Facebook that much... :-/
- jillesvangurp 8y agoYes from what I can see in my feed, Facebook is rapidly imploding. A lot of my friends, family, etc. have stopped engaging with it completely. Younger people are simply not on it at all. Long time active posters have gone silent one by one. As a consequence my feed is now completely dominated by just a handful of people that are still actively using it for whatever reason. It's less relevant to me now than at any point in the 11 or so years I've been on it.
- munchbunny 8y agoBased 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?
- not_kurt_godel 8y agoFacebook, unlike many services, has the luxury of not having to worry about backwards-incompatible changes and data migration when it comes to their user-facing experience since that's not where their money comes from. I doubt this problem was intentional, and is probably being fixed, but seems characteristic of an engineering culture that can afford to be apathetic towards such concerns, if not downright contemptuous (i.e. A/B testing user psychological/emotional state thru content manipulation).
- toyg 8y agoThe 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.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- cwyers 8y agoTweets cross-posted to Facebook was always a horrible user experience. I could never understand why anyone did it. But this hamfisted way of fixing the problem is just awful.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ddingus 8y agoThat is going to improve the trust! /s People will notice things just being different. Good object lesson, and I hope robust discussion.
- paxy 8y agoI really hope this isn't intentional. Deleting a ton of user data from their site on a whim is pretty ridiculous.
- bencompanion 8y agoThere's zero chance that it's truly been deleted - it's just not available to users anymore. Facebook wants that data with its associated discussions and interactions just as much or more than the person posting it does.
- CoughlinJ 8y agoThey definitely would not delete any data. Just remove any display or access to it.
- newfocogi 8y agoIt might just take a few more decisions like this from the social media incumbants before alternative social media structures (federated or distributed) actually make sense for the masses...
- pwaai 8y agoIt seems like Twitter is in serious trouble and Facebook is going for the kill. Hootsuite, a Vancouver micro-unicorn, a word I just coined right here and right now. Micro-unicorns are almost billion dollar companies specifically for selling to FANG. built upon Twitter, social media platforms, has recently been seen in the local news (, seems to be in trouble as well.
- ponyfleisch 8y ago> micro-unicorn Microcorn!
- SN76477 8y agoFacebook squeeze too tight. They always have, this is nothing new.
- galaxyLogic 8y agoI'm not sure I understand how this would help Facebook. Isn't it better for them the more content they have? More content more readers more advertising revenue. On the other hand there has been a lot of concerns of illegitimate accounts spreading propaganda, affecting US elections, and it may be harder for Facebook to validate accounts that basically only exist on Twitter.
- elliotec 8y agoIt seems unclear if this was actually on purpose for what it's worth, but I wouldn't give them the benefit of the doubt by any means.
- erikpukinskis 8y agoI don’t know what people are complaining about. You should’ve known when you signed up for America Online that it wasn’t the “full internet”. If you want that you should buy dialup from a real ISP.
- ubernostrum 8y agoAOL was an actual ISP. They just also had a walled-garden thing they pushed you to stay in. But you could go visit whatever sites you wanted in a regular web browser, you could do FTP and mail and stuff.
- tristanho 8y agoPretty annoying. This is following them completely banning any "posting" on behalf of users via API. (e.g the feature to cross-post tweets) While this change was definitely made in the interest of preventing spam, it also made Facebook worse as a product. We've had plenty of requests from our users who want a "share an image of my book passage to FB" feature. Not possible at all with their new stricter APIs.
- amanaplanacanal 8y agoIt's only worse as a product if it hurts advertisers. The user isn't the customer.
- wolco 8y agoThe user is the product. It removes another content source for the user causing some products to leave the platform because it becomes less useful. Facebook was the most useful pre 2012. You could create widgets that changed the look of part of your profile. Facebook games were interactive and not siloed like they are now. People posted status updates and they appeared in the news feeds of others.
- CookieMon 8y agoThey could remove the Share content instead, so feeds empty down into what friends and family are doing instead of whatever Fwd:Fwd:Fwd: manages to press the most viral buttons. /one can dream
- mabbo 8y agoThe problem here is the dichotomy of "ownership" in social media platforms. Facebook (and others) know that giving you that feeling of ownership and customization keeps you coming back. The Twitter Avatar, the Facebook profile, the MySpace page. All those posts on your profile add to your collection, your customization. They let you control that little bit so that you feel like you own it in some way. Did you love that old car so much that you put a bumper sticker on it, or did putting a bumper sticker on it make it more "yours" and so you loved it more? Same idea. But you don't own it. Nothing you post on those platforms belongs to you anymore. It's theirs, to do with as they wish. And in this case, Facebook decided that retroactively deleting all that content that lets you be aware of other platforms was good for their bottom line- do they did what they wanted with their property. Facebook deleted their posts. You only thought they were yours because Facebook makes more money if you think that.
- tylerhou 8y agoHanlon's razor, anybody? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor. This could just be a mistake.
- artursapek 8y agoDoubtful such a big change made it through Facebook's tight release process by mistake.
- LeoPanthera 8y agoThe article contains a quote from Facebook which strongly implies it is a mistake. I guess no-one read the article. “Reached for comment, Facebook says it’s aware of the issue and is looking into it.”
- C4stor 8y agoFinally someone reasonable, thank you. It looks like a mistake, FB is actively communicating it's trying to restore the content but still everyone is witch hunting. I thought people here were more sensible to the fact that developers at all companies leave bugs/undesired behaviour behind them. This may very well have been spec'd and developed 10 years ago, and now the reality have changed, but not the code. Because let's face it, it's not exactly an everyday use case.
- Memosyne 8y agoThese types of tweets always appear spammy and disingenuous so I can understand why they'd want to remove them.
- greglindahl 8y agoI have friends who are FB employees and make almost all of their postings via tweets. And then there's often FB-based discussion about them.
- throwaway76524 8y agoThis is exactly what the media corporations want. This is not an oversight. Facebook, Comcast, Disney, Google, etc will control information and as a result the general public's thoughts in due time.
- i386 8y agoVery strange product thinking at Facebook if they decided removing this feature was going to delete their data.
- noahlt 8y agoEmpirically, this seems not to have happened with my account.
- Apocryphon 8y agoI'm no longer to cross-Tweet to Facebook anymore, but my old Tweets still appear. I added the Twitter integration back in 2009-10- maybe it's from a version of the API too old to be removed.
- f_allwein 8y ago> Reached for comment, Facebook says it’s aware of the issue and is looking into it. Sounds like it may be a bug?
- anonytrary 8y agoI'm sick of hearing about Facebook all the time and I'm sick of seeing the same old recycled opinions of why people dislike or like Facebook every time Facebook sneezes. Facebook is not that interesting, and it's barely even academically interesting. It's a half-trillion dollar joke, laugh while it's still funny.
- sporkologist 8y agoFTA: "In theory, the API changes should only have prevented Twitter users from continuing to cross-post their tweets to Facebook automatically. It shouldn’t have also deleted the existing posts from Facebook users’ profiles and business users’ Facebook Pages." oops
- enobrev 8y agoAlways test migrations before running in production! Either this has been fixed, or my account hat not yet been affected.
- PaulMest 8y agoFacebook 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-from-facebook-e65fd350-1898-4bc5-af0f-81e9614f5ec1.html https://www.axios.com/how-cross-posted-tweets-disappeared-fr...
- paradite 8y agoThe 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.
- msravi 8y ago> 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 link: > ...the Twitter app for the Facebook platform was essentially made useless earlier this month once Facebook officially removed the ability to cross-post. > With the app's sole function eliminated, Twitter decided to delete it from the Facebook platform, having no reason to think that doing so would remove old tweets that were cross-posted. > It's not clear whether Facebook knew this would happen, either. Looks like Facebook did not know that Twitter would delete their app, and Twitter did not know that deleting the app would delete the content. I can understand why Facebook would have such a policy for deleted apps, and I can understand why Twitter doesn't want to have a "dead" app that's active on the Facebook platform. They probably just ought to have spoken to each other.
- pmlnr 8y agoDoes FB still allow instagram cross-posts? If yes, why is nobody sueing?
- icc97 8y agoAll the more reason to post your thoughts to your own blog and then push those to Twitter and Facebook, then the core data is your own.
- spr1ted 8y agoWell.. both companies will go down the sink as they have been heavily involded in rigging the election. Defaming trump. Disinformation.
- have_faith 8y agoI 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 their relationship with these types of platforms and what is being exchanged between you and them exactly.
- pdpi 8y agoNothing about this comes from services being paid or not. Paid services blocking (or being blocked by) third parties can and does happen.
- serhadiletir 8y agothose actions for user benefits?
- rfeather 8y agoGiven that this consequence seems to be unintended, it seems surprising that two companies this large couldn't/didn't find a way to test the effect ahead of time.
- saudioger 8y agothey put them back