7 ms·

This 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

This 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 ago
I think it would be a very smart move to plan for all of those things to happen.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
MBCook 8y ago
No, 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 ago
    Honestly 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 ago
        Yes. 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 ago
        It 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.
    - CookieMon 8y ago
      Analogies only derail arguments into being about whether the analogy captures the issue. Alex3917's analogy was bad and unnecessary, you called that out, it's now ok to leave the analogies buried and discuss what facebook did and why, rather than hunt for another hypothetical different-website-doing-different-thing analogy to start the process over.
    - cma 8y ago
- chasing 8y ago
  I liked the cross-posting because some people would comment on those Tweets on Facebook -- and then we could engage there. It did add value and wasn't just shoveled content. Anyway, I'm not particularly upset. Seems more like Facebook shooting themselves in the foot, as now I really have no reason to visit the site.
  - MBCook 8y ago
    I kind of wonder how big/common this ever was in the first place. Except possibly companies.
  - jayofdoom 8y ago
    And all those comments are gone now. That's the real "oof" of this for me, as someone who did most of my facebook posting via twitter :(.
    - GilbertErik 8y ago
      Same here. I would regularly post to twitter and wait for it to appear on Facebook and track the conversation there. The majority of old high school friends and distant relatives _only_ keep up with me through Facebook. When a post from two weeks ago didn't show up, I should've listened to my gut instinct to grab a recent dump of my FB data.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- shawn 8y ago
  It's the other way around. Why does Facebook think it has the right to remove years of their users' contributions? As the years march on, I think we'll see more and more data protection laws in favor of users rather than companies. Data is the new uranium, not the new oil. It needs to be protected and taken seriously. You can argue that it's Facebook's site and that they can do whatever they want. I argue that they cause material harm to users by removing years worth of social interactions among their family and friends. Emotional harm is still harm, and it should be treated as such. In other words, it's a shame that they didn't catch this use case sooner, but that's really not the users' problem. The fact is, users were doing this. And now that they've been doing this, it's unethical to wipe all of their conversations just because you feel you can. The largest companies are mostly monopolies. When there's nowhere else to go to have a conversation with the people you care about, what are you supposed to do when companies suddenly tell you that your conversations are violating their terms of service?
  - Bucephalus355 8y ago
    This: “Data is the new uranium, not the new oil”. Looks like Facebook is sitting on the largest legal liability of the 21st century. It’s kind of like being a major manufacturer in the US in 1970...you’re about to get screwed by 40+ years of environmental law (considering the river in Cleveland caught in fire in 1969, one can see why some of these laws were passed).
    - pdelbarba 8y ago
      *caught fire 13 times (river is the Cuyahoga)
      - Xylakant 8y ago
        The Great Lakes Brewing Company has a Burning River Pale Ale as a toast to that. https://www.greatlakesbrewing.com/burning-river https://www.greatlakesbrewing.com/burning-river
    - acjohnson55 8y ago
      Just some?
- yellowapple 8y ago
  It's more the equivalent of GitHub deleting repos that are mirrors of other repos on other sites. This is something a lot of high-profile FOSS projects do, including Linux, to get more eyes on the code and make it accessible to as many people as possible. Why should Facebook care where the post came from? It's still a post, and still gives Facebook the same access to the same data that it harvests and monetizes in the same way.
- stormbrew 8y ago
  Sure, it allowed you to just never log in, but practically speaking if you were using this feature but primarily active on twitter it actually tended to bring you to facebook when people engaged with you. I used to use something like this (it was a third party app that only cross posted things tagged #fb) and honestly it made me use facebook more. Now my facebook is a ghost town because fuck if I'm gonna post something on two different sites when something happens to me in my life. I can definitely see why people think this leads to lower engagement with facebook, but I actually expect that for the vast majority of users who used it, it was the only thing keeping them using it.
- vkou 8y ago
  > In what way, AT ALL, was this this feature good for FACEBOOK? One of my friends only cross-posts from Twitter. He doesn't engage with Facebook, but if his posts stop appearing in my feed, I engage less.
- tolmasky 8y ago
  Over the years, the few times I’d go on Facebook is when someone would respond to one of my cross-posted tweets. I set the feature up years ago, and naturally stopped interacting with Facebook, except again when someone would respond to my very active twitter through this feature. I probably will basically not use Facebook now. I’m not super mad about it or annoyed, so hopefully this doesn’t come off that way - I’m pretty nuetral about it. I am perhaps abstractly annoyed that a comment someone made on my wall is now gone maybe. But to directly answer your question, I think at least with me, this was a very useful feature for Facebook. Again, I don’t care that I won’t be using Facebook anymore now, so just one instance of this being useful for Facebook and neither here nor there for the person.
- nukemandan 8y ago
  This is why we need federated social media. I can port all my data to any platform and keep a copy of my own. then when facebook does this, I can just jump to another platform with almost no friction. EG a git repo of all my data/post and linked media that I can move from github -> gitlab
  - rspeer 8y ago
    Okay, but don't get the illusion that things like Mastodon currently let you port your identity and your data. Moving from one Mastodon instance to another involves starting over from scratch, just as much as moving from Twitter to Mastodon does. Federated portability sounds like a nice goal and I hear that some people are working on it, but nobody really knows what form it will take.
    - nukemandan 8y ago
      matrix.org is a great place to start. This can be the groundwork that you build all platforms from... maybe.
- dang 8y ago
  Can you please stop using allcaps for emphasis on HN? It's basically yelling, and the site guidelines ask you not to. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- drewmol 8y ago
  >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. Active users? https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/#0 https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...
- Angostura 8y ago
  So, I work with a school that has several Twitter accounts that cross-post to a Facebook page. Many of the parents interact with the content on Facebook, rather that Twitter. This is a plus for Facebook.
- xg15 8y ago
  > In what way, AT ALL, was this this feature good for FACEBOOK? This sums up the rationale of the platform economy rather nicely. > 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 could naively answer "because you actually want to provide a useful service for your users and not just make them hooked to your platform" - but yes, in the real world, your question is justified.
- crunchlibrarian 8y ago
  Well if it's not good for a corporation then that's that, case closed, pack it in boys, we're done here.
nradov 8y ago
I find it impossible to sympathize with anyone who considers social media a "job".
- 8_hours_ago 8y ago
  Why so? Do you think marketing is not a real job?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- roywiggins 8y ago
  It's PR, but on the web. Unless PR is also not a job?
  - AndrewKemendo 8y ago
    In 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 ago
  Jesus. Please fuck off.
- com2kid 8y ago
  Lots 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 ago
Except 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 ago
I 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.

bittercynic 8y ago

I think it would be a very smart move to plan for all of those things to happen.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

MBCook 8y ago

No, 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 ago
  Honestly 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 ago
      Yes. 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 ago
        It 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.
  - CookieMon 8y ago
    Analogies only derail arguments into being about whether the analogy captures the issue. Alex3917's analogy was bad and unnecessary, you called that out, it's now ok to leave the analogies buried and discuss what facebook did and why, rather than hunt for another hypothetical different-website-doing-different-thing analogy to start the process over.
  - cma 8y ago
chasing 8y ago
I liked the cross-posting because some people would comment on those Tweets on Facebook -- and then we could engage there. It did add value and wasn't just shoveled content. Anyway, I'm not particularly upset. Seems more like Facebook shooting themselves in the foot, as now I really have no reason to visit the site.
- MBCook 8y ago
  I kind of wonder how big/common this ever was in the first place. Except possibly companies.
- jayofdoom 8y ago
  And all those comments are gone now. That's the real "oof" of this for me, as someone who did most of my facebook posting via twitter :(.
  - GilbertErik 8y ago
    Same here. I would regularly post to twitter and wait for it to appear on Facebook and track the conversation there. The majority of old high school friends and distant relatives _only_ keep up with me through Facebook. When a post from two weeks ago didn't show up, I should've listened to my gut instinct to grab a recent dump of my FB data.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
shawn 8y ago
It's the other way around. Why does Facebook think it has the right to remove years of their users' contributions? As the years march on, I think we'll see more and more data protection laws in favor of users rather than companies. Data is the new uranium, not the new oil. It needs to be protected and taken seriously. You can argue that it's Facebook's site and that they can do whatever they want. I argue that they cause material harm to users by removing years worth of social interactions among their family and friends. Emotional harm is still harm, and it should be treated as such. In other words, it's a shame that they didn't catch this use case sooner, but that's really not the users' problem. The fact is, users were doing this. And now that they've been doing this, it's unethical to wipe all of their conversations just because you feel you can. The largest companies are mostly monopolies. When there's nowhere else to go to have a conversation with the people you care about, what are you supposed to do when companies suddenly tell you that your conversations are violating their terms of service?
- Bucephalus355 8y ago
  This: “Data is the new uranium, not the new oil”. Looks like Facebook is sitting on the largest legal liability of the 21st century. It’s kind of like being a major manufacturer in the US in 1970...you’re about to get screwed by 40+ years of environmental law (considering the river in Cleveland caught in fire in 1969, one can see why some of these laws were passed).
  - pdelbarba 8y ago
    *caught fire 13 times (river is the Cuyahoga)
    - Xylakant 8y ago
      The Great Lakes Brewing Company has a Burning River Pale Ale as a toast to that. https://www.greatlakesbrewing.com/burning-river https://www.greatlakesbrewing.com/burning-river
  - acjohnson55 8y ago
    Just some?
yellowapple 8y ago
It's more the equivalent of GitHub deleting repos that are mirrors of other repos on other sites. This is something a lot of high-profile FOSS projects do, including Linux, to get more eyes on the code and make it accessible to as many people as possible. Why should Facebook care where the post came from? It's still a post, and still gives Facebook the same access to the same data that it harvests and monetizes in the same way.
stormbrew 8y ago
Sure, it allowed you to just never log in, but practically speaking if you were using this feature but primarily active on twitter it actually tended to bring you to facebook when people engaged with you. I used to use something like this (it was a third party app that only cross posted things tagged #fb) and honestly it made me use facebook more. Now my facebook is a ghost town because fuck if I'm gonna post something on two different sites when something happens to me in my life. I can definitely see why people think this leads to lower engagement with facebook, but I actually expect that for the vast majority of users who used it, it was the only thing keeping them using it.
vkou 8y ago
> In what way, AT ALL, was this this feature good for FACEBOOK? One of my friends only cross-posts from Twitter. He doesn't engage with Facebook, but if his posts stop appearing in my feed, I engage less.
tolmasky 8y ago
Over the years, the few times I’d go on Facebook is when someone would respond to one of my cross-posted tweets. I set the feature up years ago, and naturally stopped interacting with Facebook, except again when someone would respond to my very active twitter through this feature. I probably will basically not use Facebook now. I’m not super mad about it or annoyed, so hopefully this doesn’t come off that way - I’m pretty nuetral about it. I am perhaps abstractly annoyed that a comment someone made on my wall is now gone maybe. But to directly answer your question, I think at least with me, this was a very useful feature for Facebook. Again, I don’t care that I won’t be using Facebook anymore now, so just one instance of this being useful for Facebook and neither here nor there for the person.
nukemandan 8y ago
This is why we need federated social media. I can port all my data to any platform and keep a copy of my own. then when facebook does this, I can just jump to another platform with almost no friction. EG a git repo of all my data/post and linked media that I can move from github -> gitlab
- rspeer 8y ago
  Okay, but don't get the illusion that things like Mastodon currently let you port your identity and your data. Moving from one Mastodon instance to another involves starting over from scratch, just as much as moving from Twitter to Mastodon does. Federated portability sounds like a nice goal and I hear that some people are working on it, but nobody really knows what form it will take.
  - nukemandan 8y ago
    matrix.org is a great place to start. This can be the groundwork that you build all platforms from... maybe.
dang 8y ago
Can you please stop using allcaps for emphasis on HN? It's basically yelling, and the site guidelines ask you not to. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
drewmol 8y ago
>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. Active users? https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/#0 https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...
Angostura 8y ago
So, I work with a school that has several Twitter accounts that cross-post to a Facebook page. Many of the parents interact with the content on Facebook, rather that Twitter. This is a plus for Facebook.
xg15 8y ago
> In what way, AT ALL, was this this feature good for FACEBOOK? This sums up the rationale of the platform economy rather nicely. > 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 could naively answer "because you actually want to provide a useful service for your users and not just make them hooked to your platform" - but yes, in the real world, your question is justified.
crunchlibrarian 8y ago
Well if it's not good for a corporation then that's that, case closed, pack it in boys, we're done here.

nradov 8y ago

I find it impossible to sympathize with anyone who considers social media a "job".

8_hours_ago 8y ago
Why so? Do you think marketing is not a real job?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
roywiggins 8y ago
It's PR, but on the web. Unless PR is also not a job?
- AndrewKemendo 8y ago
  In 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 ago
Jesus. Please fuck off.
com2kid 8y ago
Lots 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 ago

Except 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 ago

I 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.