21 ms·

When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

311 points by input_sh 6y ago

the-dude 6y ago
Prior restraint!
- sneak 6y ago
  uhh, EXCUSE ME MISS
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
instagraham 6y ago
Isn't it a similar situation with Twitter blue ticks now? You have to know someone at Twitter to get them?
- _-___________-_ 6y ago
  What does that have to do with the article?
  - gifnamething 6y ago
    The significant section on the author struggling to contact Facebook?
nanis 6y ago
Looking at > He immediately gets angry at Facebook messing up his name. The company changes his name to ‘Hans De Zwart’, with a capitalized D. A small annoyance, but for De Zwart it signifies something bigger: “It is the arrogance of a giant American corporation which considers the correct spelling of the names of millions of Dutch people an edge case.” I am really confused. I am assuming the correct spelling is "de Zwart" ... since a human is writing this article, it shouldn't have been too hard for him to use the correct spelling or check the work of any computer involved in publishing the piece.
- _-___________-_ 6y ago
  It was actually translated into English by De Zwart himself. I believe that proper capitalisation of Dutch names with 'de' is to keep the 'd' lowercase if stating the full name (Hans de Zwart), but to capitalise the 'd' if stating just the last name (De Zwart), which the article seems to do consistently (except when quoting Facebook's mangling of the name).
  - etripe 6y ago
    In this context, Dutch refers to the country The Netherlands, not the language. Based on my non-linguist opinion, I would say you're correct. Dutch people tend to not capitalise their Ds in surnames. When only mentioning the surname, it is treated as a mini-sentence, hence the capitalisaiton. In northern Belgium (AKA Flanders), Dutch speakers tend to capitalise their Ds in surnames, so you would see "De Zwart" regardless of where it appears in the sentence. In case you're wondering: yes, there are quite a few surnames that exist both in The Netherlands with "de" and in Belgium with "De". The same goes for "van" (of) and "vander/van der" (of the), for instance. Then again, if they're nobility, they might not capitalise the "de" because it might be the French "of" as opposed to the Dutch "de", meaning "the". Confusing stuff.
    - Al-Khwarizmi 6y ago
      In Spain we don't have so many surnames prefixed with particles, but we do have some (e.g. "Del Río") and the capitalization also works as you describe for Dutch. It makes sense: when you say Juan del Río it's obvious that it's a surname, but if you just said "del Río" without context, the "del" could be confused with the common word.
      - etripe 6y ago
        Exactly. In the Dutch example, "de Zwart" in the middle of a sentence would be a misspelling of "de Zwarte", meaning "the Black".
  - bambax 6y ago
surajs 6y ago
"duped by facebook" sounds like an oxymoron, idk
op03 6y ago
Facebook is trying to administer a 2 billion member virtual city with about 20k people. Most of the fires that start and actual administration details are just conveniently left to real world politicians, bureaucracies, journos, school boards, parents and police depts to work out. This retarded unsustainable model has been sold as the magic of Scale. Scaling user base = Scaling up issues. No free lunch. Regulators can be asking a simple question - how many people are needed to administrate a 2 billion member city? How many does Facebook have to do the job. And if they dont have enough how to charge them for all the resource/energy drainage they offload to the real world.
- kokey 6y ago
  It's the problem anyone who moderates a system faces, when the users vastly outnumbers the moderators your moderation has to have some level of opaqueness and unpredictability or else you have no chance of keeping up with people gaming the system.
  - barrkel 6y ago
    Or you delegate. Grant trusted individuals power to moderate sub-communities. How do you ensure you select trusted individuals? Create institutional mechanisms with accountability and checks and balances; e.g. community voting to bestow time-limited power on individuals, and appeal boards to as a check on abuses of that power, and perhaps recall votes to remove someone. Opaqueness isn't the answer. Opaqueness leads to injustice. You certainly don't have a chance of keeping up if you don't use the technology we've developed over thousands of years specifically to deal with people gaming systems. The technology of government.
    - DodgyEggplant 6y ago
      The dude will abide
    - edmundsauto 6y ago
      Are there sites that have done this at scale? Reddit and Wikipedia come to mind as counter examples, where the people with the most time and desire for power end up doing almost all the moderation.
input_sh 6y ago
I was a Mozilla Open Web Fellow a few years back at Bits of Freedom, and as one of the goodbye gifts Hans of course gave me the DVD of The Big Lebowski: https://twitter.com/input_sh/status/1315926558134210560 https://twitter.com/input_sh/status/1315926558134210560 Still unopened because I haven't owned a DVD player since.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ascar 6y ago
> He immediately gets angry at Facebook messing up his name. The company changes his name to ‘Hans De Zwart’, with a capitalized D. A small annoyance, but for De Zwart it signifies something bigger: “It is the arrogance of a giant American corporation which considers the correct spelling of the names of millions of Dutch people an edge case.” This reminds me of the excellent "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names" [1]. As a person with a hyphen in his first name I also get regularly mistreated by all kinds of web forms, worst of all flight tickets, which is especially ironic as you are usually explicitly requested to provide the name as stated in the passport. [1] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
- m4lvin 6y ago
  I am still surprised that the two-character icons which Zoom uses for accounts without profile pictures become "A�" for anyone called "Alice Ørland" or similar. It is even more surprising that Ö, Š, etc. become �, but 文军 shows up fine.
  - capableweb 6y ago
    Not so weird when you consider the context. Zoom is an North American company with most (if not all) of it's product/engineering development happening in China. Just reading public information, it seems they have no development teams in the North of Europe nor Eastern Europe, so it's only natural that some character sets ends up better supported than others.
    - _-___________-_ 6y ago
      It's likely that all the characters are being transferred and stored in the same charset (probably a Unicode one) regardless of what character is entered. The replacement glyph (the question mark) might be caused by their use of a font with incomplete Unicode coverage, or (more likely) by a buggy "take the first character of each word in their name" algorithm, for example using the first byte and then special-casing Chinese under the mistaken impression that nothing else needs more than one byte.
dschuetz 6y ago
A brilliant read. Just what I needed today. Thanks for sharing!
danieldk 6y ago
The company changes his name to ‘Hans De Zwart’, with a capitalized D. A small annoyance, but for De Zwart it signifies something bigger Oh yes. At some point this was a very annoying problem on Facebook. Our last name has ‘de’ as well and Facebook refused to have ‘de’ in lowercase in my wife’s name unless she sent them a photo copy of her ID. At some point they started permitting lowercase Dutch ‘tussenvoegsels’ again. But it showed so little appreciation of other languages and cultures. (It’s like Apple/Siri and others pretending that everyone uses a single language in their daily life.)
- raverbashing 6y ago
  If there's one thing that's constant amongst American companies (through various extents) is their blindness to other cultures and conventions (even things like the metric system or DD/MM/AA formats) .
techaddict009 6y ago
Happened with me many times. I run various amazon affiliate site. Some times I get expired brandable domain names which are available to buy. When I share any post on fb page from them I get same error and there is no way to fix it. I just have to stop working on those niche sites on fb promotion. FB sucks sometimes. I can feel this guys frustration.
osobo 6y ago
Pfff, such fabricated drama. This shit gives real digital rights activists a bad name.
- input_sh 6y ago
  He was the director of Bits of Freedom, one of the founding organisations of EDRi[0] (think: European EFF). That being said, he left that spot a few years ago and this is just his side project, but saying that he's not a "real digital rights activist" is just ridiculous on so many levels. [0] https://edri.org/ https://edri.org/
  - osobo 6y ago
    Whatever he did in the past, this whining about FB not linking his database with copyrighted script -interlaced with non-issues like how a platform he does not use spells his name- doesn't help anyone much now. There are bigger digital rights fish to fry.
- LocalH 6y ago
  You have a problem with advocating for correct representation of people’s names?
louwrentius 6y ago
I think if you work at Facebook, I wonder how you can live with yourself, helping to make the world a worse place. Having worked at Facebook should make you a paria, nobody should hire you. Facebook should be a stain on your resume.
- disgruntledphd2 6y ago
  And where do you work? I can probably (almost certainly) find serious ethical lapses in your company, if it's large and/or has been around for a long time. Shaming people based on their perceived associations is just wrong, no matter what those associations.
  - louwrentius 6y ago
    I won't disclose that but rest assured, I don't work at Facebook or any other similar style company that is a detriment to a stable society. If you work at Facebook, I despise you. (you in the general sense) The foundation of the company is a guy who thought it was OK to create website to rate women. Fucking degenerate people.
    - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
      Can you explain (with links please) how Facebook is a "detriment to a stable society". > If you work at Facebook, I despise you. (you in the general sense) I think that is massive hyperbole. Do you despise all the people who work for oil companies also? What about everyone who works for Nestle (all the pushing of formula milk in Africa that led to the deaths of babies), I mean where does it all stop? > The foundation of the company is a guy who thought it was OK to create website to rate women. Fucking degenerate people. He was a 19 year old man at this point (and I'm not even sure that happened anywhere except The Social Network). I'm pretty sure lots of 19 year old males have done things similarly except no one cares, because they're not billionaires.
  - callmeal 6y ago
    >Shaming people based on their perceived associations is just wrong, no matter what those associations. Uh, there's a whole group of people at the end of WWII who would disagree with you.
numpad0 6y ago
IMHO: A private company, under a nation, shouldn’t be allowed to require PII, let alone forcing to publish it, unless it is absolutely necessary(not in the way Facebook works) or required by law(webshops, banks) to do so. Facebook as it is isn’t compatible with society. It’s at least a decade past the point it had to be corrected.
- robertlagrant 6y ago
  This really isn't the problem at hand.
tchalla 6y ago
Once, I had a message on WhatsApp not delivered to the recipient. I contacted WhatsApp support about this. I haven't received a response yet. I sent them the screenshots and all details they requested off me. This was 2 years ago and I still have the request number with me.
satyanash 6y ago
OT: Why are medium.com URLs getting special subdirectory handling for usernames in the trailing HN title parentheses?
- LeonB 6y ago
  It’s a new feature. There’s some related discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24754456 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24754456
- ebg13 6y ago
  HN has done some variant of this for a long time now with subdomains, but often you had to send an email to request sites with personal subdomains to be added to the list if they weren't already. It's because your rando personal blog is _not_ medium. It's just _on_ medium. Your rando personal github repository is _not_ github. It's just _on_ github.
qq12as 6y ago
People are commenting that the FB's bureaucratic system is idiotic and unsustainable. I don't understand why: bureaucracies are a brilliant response by oversized institutions/businesses to force people to reveal how much they care about solving an issue. Don't really need your website to be cleared? You won't make a fuss about it. Is it unjust and inequitable? Yes. Is it unsustainable? Cannot see why.
nicbou 6y ago
I have experienced this many times. It's unfortunately a sign of the times. One morning, my bank account was frozen by the tax office. It took me two days and many calls to even understand what was going on. There was no warning, no apparent reason why direct debit would fail that one time, but it took me 7 days to get access to my account again. Meanwhile, I couldn't buy groceries. I got a few late payment fees and a mark on my credit score. No one apologised. No one even noticed. This is not a tech problem. It's a scaling problem. An increasingly large part of your life is at the mercy of automated systems. If you don't fit on a flowchart designed by a white collar guy in California, you don't exist. If one in a billion users has an issue, they must be really loud for one in twenty thousand employees to pay attention.
- aiur 6y ago
  You can’t have your cake and eat it too. If you want a good user experience, pay for it.
  - nicbou 6y ago
    There is unfortunately no alternative in many cases. There is no cloud provider with concierge service, nor any alternative to the dreaded Finanzamt.
skocznymroczny 6y ago
Could it be related to Zwarte Piet? Perhaps Facebook is just banning everything containing "Zwart" in its content, just to be on the safe side.
- eythian 6y ago
  I'd hope not, that would be a completely wrong-headed decision by them as "Zwarte" isn't an uncommon surname/surname part, just like "Black" isn't uncommon in English-speaking countries. Which of course doesn't preclude Facebook from making a completely wrong-headed decision.
jaspax 6y ago
Any guesses what tipped the automated system off? Two guesses: 1. The Big Lebowski uses the word "fuck" many, _many_ times, which may start to look abusive to an online system that doesn't know any better. 2. The movie contains references to nihilists and Nazis which an irony-unaware system may not be able to distinguish from actual endorsement.
- darepublic 6y ago
  Someone with access to FB and it's monorepo could likely find the entry where biglebow.ski is blocked and perhaps create a PR to unblock it
blunte 6y ago
There are so many ways to have a problem with Facebook and be unable to get help. The list of ways grows... My "favorite" is if you once had a spare FB account for playing some game, and later FB has blocked that account (for inactivity, or being obviously fake _after_ they instituted the real name policy)... but you still get occasional emails from FB begging you to come back and login - your friends miss you! Of course you cannot login, and you cannot stop the fucking emails from FB. There's no process for dealing with this, so you ultimately have to write a custom filter to process these zombie FB emails. I urge everyone, no matter what your "need" to have an account on FB is, to just stop logging in. Don't delete the account... just never login again. Facebook will continue as a bad and irresponsible actor of global proportions until we collectively send it the way of MySpace.
- kalium-xyz 6y ago
  If you are European you can report them for this as it goes against the GDPR[0]. You can also just send an angry email to their data officer which they have to reply to by law, and enjoy the template reaction of "we are currently too busy" followed by dismissal a few months later. If you are not European you can probably still use their mechanisms for complying with the GDPR to fix this as they cant really tell who is a European citizen and who is not. [0] https://gdpr.eu/email-encryption/ https://gdpr.eu/email-encryption/
- dingaling 6y ago
  > Facebook will continue as a bad and irresponsible actor of global proportions I log in, I have a browse at what my acquaintances have posted, I close the tab and go on with the day. Sometimes I flick through the 'People you may know' and smile at some old real-world friends. For the vast majority of people, Facebook is a positive experience.
  - Miraste 6y ago
    That's nice, but has nothing to do with whether they're a bad and irresponsible actor.
  - jfengel 6y ago
richrichardsson 6y ago
A big part of this I think is due to "uncommon" TLDs. I had a joke "quiz" .website domain that was insta-blocked by Facebook for no reason and was impossible to get revoked. That was a complete waste of time when the main way I intended for it to get some traction was through Facebook shares.
- keraf 6y ago
  I registered a .as domain for my last name (ending in 'as') and managed to set it as my primary email on Facebook shorty before they decided to block that domain for no apparent reason. For years (until I deleted my FB account), I had a message on the top of my feed asking me to confirm my email even though it was already confirmed but I could never do it because of the block. Tried many times to get it resolved but no success. And to this day, people cannot send posts or messages that contain my domain (website or email) anywhere on Facebook and Instagram.
RickJWagner 6y ago
This aggression will not stand, man.
kalium-xyz 6y ago
One can only wonder how much the economic damage is from such small annoyances. I always have to check under the D for Dutch, N for Netherlands, and T for The when filling in my nationality or my postal address on an international form. Its a minor annoyance till you encounter very important forms without an easy way to scroll or some other broken UI making input hard.
jungletime 6y ago
There is an episode on the simpsons, which I think illustrates the problem with the modern times. Everyone overreacting to a snippet of information, without knowing what came before or after. The overreacting to the overreactions. Its two villages making up stories about what happens in the other village, and each turn, the story gets embellished. How To Cook For Forty Humans https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxI7B758XBQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxI7B758XBQ
- nerdponx 6y ago
  I don't get the relevance. Is this article an overreaction?
  - jungletime 6y ago
    The movie revolves around misunderstanding and incomplete information. There are people on facebook trying to cause such misunderstandings using selective clips, and quotes all the time. Consider the BLM protests, most of the cases, are kind of grey area. People don't have the full information. There are much more clear cut cases around BLM could have focused on. Yet they chose these ones. Why? They pick the controversial ones, over witch people will argue endlessly. People might be rioting right now over something that is not even True.
Yhippa 6y ago
How is it that fake news, misinformation, and conspiracy theories are allowed to run wild on the platform but then VERY SERIOUS things like this are taken care of?
duxup 6y ago
>The website has all this time been incorrectly labelled “by our automated tools” as spam, according to the spokesperson. “Our apologies for the inconvenience.” It seems the large tech companies just have a policy to automate as much as possible and if it impacts some folks unfairly, that's just how it works and they've no interest in dealing with it unless it gets PR. Otherwise screw those little people. I had a domain through blogger that I registered ages ago on the blogger site. Google started emailing me that it was expiring and directed me to Gsuite.... but I don't have a Gsuite account and google didn't make one for me... The domain didn't appear in my Google domains account. Google had just pointed blogger domain users to Gsuite and called it a day. Google was no help, I never got a response from the handful of ways (none of them good) trying to reach out to them. Finally I found the old registrar google used behind the scenes and they let me renew the domain. I never heard back from google other than all the spam about my domain expiring and asking me to login to Gsuite... repeatedly.. sent to an email without a Gusite account.. someone just flipped a switch and screw everyone I guess.
- PragmaticPulp 6y ago
  > It seems the large tech companies just have a policy to automate as much as possible Mistakes happen at scale regardless of whether it's automated or human-controlled. Having actual humans do the work is hardly a magic bullet, because people make mistakes frequently as well. Worse yet, humans are more prone to being compromised or acting maliciously, such as in recent attacks on prominent companies. It's not so much as a policy as a necessity. Facebook's number of users is counted in the billions. They have about 50,000 users for each Facebook employee. Most importantly: People aren't paying Facebook. It's just not realistic to expect a free platform serving billions of users to have 100% perfect execution.
  - cycomanic 6y ago
    I hear this argument all the time, but Facebook is one of the richest companies in the world so they could definitely afford to hire some more people that could look at complaints. They just choose not to because they don't care. If it suddenly would affect their bottom line I bet you they would hire people very quickly.
barkingcat 6y ago
This article screws around with de Zwart's name so much while complaining about another organization's screwing around of his last name is really something.
- detaro 6y ago
  How does it "screw around" with the name?
  - tekknolagi 6y ago
    de Zwart -> De Zwart
  - barkingcat 6y ago
    The the name de Zwart appears inconsistently capitalized throughout the article. If you do a matched-case search in the body text, de Zwart appears 3 times, while De Zwart occurs 7 times outside of quotation marks, and other locations (like at the beginning of a sentence) where English rules will capitalize a name. I believe to follow proper Dutch capitalization, it should be similar to, for example: Being a digital rights activist, de Zwart knows this discussion very well, so he starts to meticulously log his attempts to get clarity. However, I can't be sure if in Dutch, a lower case pre-surname is capitalized in circumstances when it's used in a sentence vs as a full name. Without the clarification of rules governing the use of such lower case surnames, I can't be exactly sure whether the capitalization is on purpose or not.
    - detaro 6y ago
      Luckily a large part of this HN discussion already goes into detail about this.
      - barkingcat 6y ago
        For example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24763789 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24763789
- 6y ago
prepend 6y ago
This reminds me of studying ethics from a deontological and utilitarian model. The discussion was about whether it’s better to optimize for the greater good or to have a rules based system of right and wrong. To me, utilitarian seems like the best outcome because the most people are improved. But the way to get there, I think, is through deontological methods because it’s actually unclear what actions can be taken to lead to an outcome. So trying to optimize in the short term can lead to unexpected side effects. Having a rules based system and following it even if it costs $1M to fix a $1 problem seems better in the long run because it is predictable and solves hidden problems. It seems Facebook is MLing itself into a feedback loop that is missing any core value other than “let’s make it work for 99% and not worry.” But I think this piles up little slices of technical debt until it eventually breaks.
WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
Consistent, quality content moderation at scale is impossible
cycomanic 6y ago
He should go to small claims court (or the Dutch equivalent) to get his 5 euros back. There was actually a case in Germany where the largest ISPs continously ignored a customer whom they charged too much at some point (similar order as the 5 euros) . The story ended with a court bailiff (?) going into the main ISP office and seizing a printer I believe. Big PR disaster and much higher cost then the original amount. These big companies do these things all the time calculating on people just giving up. We should take the advantage of the courts to teach some lessons as much as possible.
wyldfire 6y ago
Published under de Zwart's medium, but "Written by Reinier Kist." That's puzzling. Maybe de Zwart just kept pursuing up to the point that he paid a ghostwriter to blog something about it? Frustrating "experience", to be sure.
- input_sh 6y ago
  It was published in Dutch by Reiner Kist, and Hans himself translated it to English. It says so in the footer.
moron4hire 6y ago
Back when I got my driver's license in the late 90s, Pennsylvania couldn't handle Scottish surnames, so my last name ended up "MC BETH" after I wrote it on the form as "McBeth" (which is ludicrous, there have been Scots people in Pennsylvania far longer than there have been licenses). When I moved to Virginia 7 years ago, Virginia could handle it, but my PA license showed a "MC BETH", so my VA license shows "MC BETH". Before they issue the license, they give you a form to review. They warn you to check the form for errors, because errors are "serious business" with "serious consequences". So I point out the space on the form, that it is not the correct spelling of my name. The clerk got quite surly with me. It didn't matter that all the other documentation I had to submit--including my birth certificate--along with my change of residency showed "McBeth". Apparently, the PA DMV of 1998 was infallible and I'm now trying to pull some sort of fraud fastball in VA in getting that space removed.
eithed 6y ago
I was awaiting the conclusion that de Zwart started using De Zwart surname because of Facebook.
brisky 6y ago
I also had my website "reported" as suspicious in facebook. There is no official way to get more information or unblock your website. I see this as a darker pattern where facebook algorithms are tuned to block 3rd party external information content. In this way facebook is promoting sharing information only created within facebook platform.
da39a3ee 6y ago
> He immediately gets angry at Facebook messing up his name. The company changes his name to ‘Hans De Zwart’, with a capitalized D. The name seems to be spelled with a capitalized D throughout this Medium essay also.
croes 6y ago
This is the result of monopolies. The internet is meant for communication by defining protocols to connect all computers with each other. This allows everyone to participate and at the same time creates redundancy, which minimises failures. Companies like FB are a perversion of this purpose, instead of using free protocols, communication is done by a few programs. This creates the basis for censorship and forms a bottleneck or a predetermined breaking point.
techbio 6y ago
https://www.thebiglebow.ski/at-least-its-an-ethos https://www.thebiglebow.ski/at-least-its-an-ethos

311 points by input_sh 6y ago

the-dude 6y ago

Prior restraint!

sneak 6y ago
uhh, EXCUSE ME MISS

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

instagraham 6y ago

Isn't it a similar situation with Twitter blue ticks now? You have to know someone at Twitter to get them?

_-___________-_ 6y ago
What does that have to do with the article?
- gifnamething 6y ago
  The significant section on the author struggling to contact Facebook?

nanis 6y ago

Looking at > He immediately gets angry at Facebook messing up his name. The company changes his name to ‘Hans De Zwart’, with a capitalized D. A small annoyance, but for De Zwart it signifies something bigger: “It is the arrogance of a giant American corporation which considers the correct spelling of the names of millions of Dutch people an edge case.” I am really confused. I am assuming the correct spelling is "de Zwart" ... since a human is writing this article, it shouldn't have been too hard for him to use the correct spelling or check the work of any computer involved in publishing the piece.

_-___________-_ 6y ago
It was actually translated into English by De Zwart himself. I believe that proper capitalisation of Dutch names with 'de' is to keep the 'd' lowercase if stating the full name (Hans de Zwart), but to capitalise the 'd' if stating just the last name (De Zwart), which the article seems to do consistently (except when quoting Facebook's mangling of the name).
- etripe 6y ago
  In this context, Dutch refers to the country The Netherlands, not the language. Based on my non-linguist opinion, I would say you're correct. Dutch people tend to not capitalise their Ds in surnames. When only mentioning the surname, it is treated as a mini-sentence, hence the capitalisaiton. In northern Belgium (AKA Flanders), Dutch speakers tend to capitalise their Ds in surnames, so you would see "De Zwart" regardless of where it appears in the sentence. In case you're wondering: yes, there are quite a few surnames that exist both in The Netherlands with "de" and in Belgium with "De". The same goes for "van" (of) and "vander/van der" (of the), for instance. Then again, if they're nobility, they might not capitalise the "de" because it might be the French "of" as opposed to the Dutch "de", meaning "the". Confusing stuff.
  - Al-Khwarizmi 6y ago
    In Spain we don't have so many surnames prefixed with particles, but we do have some (e.g. "Del Río") and the capitalization also works as you describe for Dutch. It makes sense: when you say Juan del Río it's obvious that it's a surname, but if you just said "del Río" without context, the "del" could be confused with the common word.
    - etripe 6y ago
      Exactly. In the Dutch example, "de Zwart" in the middle of a sentence would be a misspelling of "de Zwarte", meaning "the Black".
- bambax 6y ago

surajs 6y ago

"duped by facebook" sounds like an oxymoron, idk

op03 6y ago

Facebook is trying to administer a 2 billion member virtual city with about 20k people. Most of the fires that start and actual administration details are just conveniently left to real world politicians, bureaucracies, journos, school boards, parents and police depts to work out. This retarded unsustainable model has been sold as the magic of Scale. Scaling user base = Scaling up issues. No free lunch. Regulators can be asking a simple question - how many people are needed to administrate a 2 billion member city? How many does Facebook have to do the job. And if they dont have enough how to charge them for all the resource/energy drainage they offload to the real world.

kokey 6y ago
It's the problem anyone who moderates a system faces, when the users vastly outnumbers the moderators your moderation has to have some level of opaqueness and unpredictability or else you have no chance of keeping up with people gaming the system.
- barrkel 6y ago
  Or you delegate. Grant trusted individuals power to moderate sub-communities. How do you ensure you select trusted individuals? Create institutional mechanisms with accountability and checks and balances; e.g. community voting to bestow time-limited power on individuals, and appeal boards to as a check on abuses of that power, and perhaps recall votes to remove someone. Opaqueness isn't the answer. Opaqueness leads to injustice. You certainly don't have a chance of keeping up if you don't use the technology we've developed over thousands of years specifically to deal with people gaming systems. The technology of government.
  - DodgyEggplant 6y ago
    The dude will abide
  - edmundsauto 6y ago
    Are there sites that have done this at scale? Reddit and Wikipedia come to mind as counter examples, where the people with the most time and desire for power end up doing almost all the moderation.

input_sh 6y ago

I was a Mozilla Open Web Fellow a few years back at Bits of Freedom, and as one of the goodbye gifts Hans of course gave me the DVD of The Big Lebowski: https://twitter.com/input_sh/status/1315926558134210560 https://twitter.com/input_sh/status/1315926558134210560 Still unopened because I haven't owned a DVD player since.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

ascar 6y ago

> He immediately gets angry at Facebook messing up his name. The company changes his name to ‘Hans De Zwart’, with a capitalized D. A small annoyance, but for De Zwart it signifies something bigger: “It is the arrogance of a giant American corporation which considers the correct spelling of the names of millions of Dutch people an edge case.” This reminds me of the excellent "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names" [1]. As a person with a hyphen in his first name I also get regularly mistreated by all kinds of web forms, worst of all flight tickets, which is especially ironic as you are usually explicitly requested to provide the name as stated in the passport. [1] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

m4lvin 6y ago
I am still surprised that the two-character icons which Zoom uses for accounts without profile pictures become "A�" for anyone called "Alice Ørland" or similar. It is even more surprising that Ö, Š, etc. become �, but 文军 shows up fine.
- capableweb 6y ago
  Not so weird when you consider the context. Zoom is an North American company with most (if not all) of it's product/engineering development happening in China. Just reading public information, it seems they have no development teams in the North of Europe nor Eastern Europe, so it's only natural that some character sets ends up better supported than others.
  - _-___________-_ 6y ago
    It's likely that all the characters are being transferred and stored in the same charset (probably a Unicode one) regardless of what character is entered. The replacement glyph (the question mark) might be caused by their use of a font with incomplete Unicode coverage, or (more likely) by a buggy "take the first character of each word in their name" algorithm, for example using the first byte and then special-casing Chinese under the mistaken impression that nothing else needs more than one byte.

dschuetz 6y ago

A brilliant read. Just what I needed today. Thanks for sharing!

danieldk 6y ago

The company changes his name to ‘Hans De Zwart’, with a capitalized D. A small annoyance, but for De Zwart it signifies something bigger Oh yes. At some point this was a very annoying problem on Facebook. Our last name has ‘de’ as well and Facebook refused to have ‘de’ in lowercase in my wife’s name unless she sent them a photo copy of her ID. At some point they started permitting lowercase Dutch ‘tussenvoegsels’ again. But it showed so little appreciation of other languages and cultures. (It’s like Apple/Siri and others pretending that everyone uses a single language in their daily life.)

raverbashing 6y ago
If there's one thing that's constant amongst American companies (through various extents) is their blindness to other cultures and conventions (even things like the metric system or DD/MM/AA formats) .

techaddict009 6y ago

Happened with me many times. I run various amazon affiliate site. Some times I get expired brandable domain names which are available to buy. When I share any post on fb page from them I get same error and there is no way to fix it. I just have to stop working on those niche sites on fb promotion. FB sucks sometimes. I can feel this guys frustration.

osobo 6y ago

Pfff, such fabricated drama. This shit gives real digital rights activists a bad name.

input_sh 6y ago
He was the director of Bits of Freedom, one of the founding organisations of EDRi[0] (think: European EFF). That being said, he left that spot a few years ago and this is just his side project, but saying that he's not a "real digital rights activist" is just ridiculous on so many levels. [0] https://edri.org/ https://edri.org/
- osobo 6y ago
  Whatever he did in the past, this whining about FB not linking his database with copyrighted script -interlaced with non-issues like how a platform he does not use spells his name- doesn't help anyone much now. There are bigger digital rights fish to fry.
LocalH 6y ago
You have a problem with advocating for correct representation of people’s names?

louwrentius 6y ago

I think if you work at Facebook, I wonder how you can live with yourself, helping to make the world a worse place. Having worked at Facebook should make you a paria, nobody should hire you. Facebook should be a stain on your resume.

disgruntledphd2 6y ago
And where do you work? I can probably (almost certainly) find serious ethical lapses in your company, if it's large and/or has been around for a long time. Shaming people based on their perceived associations is just wrong, no matter what those associations.
- louwrentius 6y ago
  I won't disclose that but rest assured, I don't work at Facebook or any other similar style company that is a detriment to a stable society. If you work at Facebook, I despise you. (you in the general sense) The foundation of the company is a guy who thought it was OK to create website to rate women. Fucking degenerate people.
  - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
    Can you explain (with links please) how Facebook is a "detriment to a stable society". > If you work at Facebook, I despise you. (you in the general sense) I think that is massive hyperbole. Do you despise all the people who work for oil companies also? What about everyone who works for Nestle (all the pushing of formula milk in Africa that led to the deaths of babies), I mean where does it all stop? > The foundation of the company is a guy who thought it was OK to create website to rate women. Fucking degenerate people. He was a 19 year old man at this point (and I'm not even sure that happened anywhere except The Social Network). I'm pretty sure lots of 19 year old males have done things similarly except no one cares, because they're not billionaires.
- callmeal 6y ago
  >Shaming people based on their perceived associations is just wrong, no matter what those associations. Uh, there's a whole group of people at the end of WWII who would disagree with you.

numpad0 6y ago

IMHO: A private company, under a nation, shouldn’t be allowed to require PII, let alone forcing to publish it, unless it is absolutely necessary(not in the way Facebook works) or required by law(webshops, banks) to do so. Facebook as it is isn’t compatible with society. It’s at least a decade past the point it had to be corrected.

robertlagrant 6y ago
This really isn't the problem at hand.

tchalla 6y ago

Once, I had a message on WhatsApp not delivered to the recipient. I contacted WhatsApp support about this. I haven't received a response yet. I sent them the screenshots and all details they requested off me. This was 2 years ago and I still have the request number with me.

satyanash 6y ago

OT: Why are medium.com URLs getting special subdirectory handling for usernames in the trailing HN title parentheses?

LeonB 6y ago
It’s a new feature. There’s some related discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24754456 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24754456
ebg13 6y ago
HN has done some variant of this for a long time now with subdomains, but often you had to send an email to request sites with personal subdomains to be added to the list if they weren't already. It's because your rando personal blog is _not_ medium. It's just _on_ medium. Your rando personal github repository is _not_ github. It's just _on_ github.

qq12as 6y ago

People are commenting that the FB's bureaucratic system is idiotic and unsustainable. I don't understand why: bureaucracies are a brilliant response by oversized institutions/businesses to force people to reveal how much they care about solving an issue. Don't really need your website to be cleared? You won't make a fuss about it. Is it unjust and inequitable? Yes. Is it unsustainable? Cannot see why.

nicbou 6y ago

I have experienced this many times. It's unfortunately a sign of the times. One morning, my bank account was frozen by the tax office. It took me two days and many calls to even understand what was going on. There was no warning, no apparent reason why direct debit would fail that one time, but it took me 7 days to get access to my account again. Meanwhile, I couldn't buy groceries. I got a few late payment fees and a mark on my credit score. No one apologised. No one even noticed. This is not a tech problem. It's a scaling problem. An increasingly large part of your life is at the mercy of automated systems. If you don't fit on a flowchart designed by a white collar guy in California, you don't exist. If one in a billion users has an issue, they must be really loud for one in twenty thousand employees to pay attention.

aiur 6y ago
You can’t have your cake and eat it too. If you want a good user experience, pay for it.
- nicbou 6y ago
  There is unfortunately no alternative in many cases. There is no cloud provider with concierge service, nor any alternative to the dreaded Finanzamt.

skocznymroczny 6y ago

Could it be related to Zwarte Piet? Perhaps Facebook is just banning everything containing "Zwart" in its content, just to be on the safe side.

eythian 6y ago
I'd hope not, that would be a completely wrong-headed decision by them as "Zwarte" isn't an uncommon surname/surname part, just like "Black" isn't uncommon in English-speaking countries. Which of course doesn't preclude Facebook from making a completely wrong-headed decision.

jaspax 6y ago

Any guesses what tipped the automated system off? Two guesses: 1. The Big Lebowski uses the word "fuck" many, _many_ times, which may start to look abusive to an online system that doesn't know any better. 2. The movie contains references to nihilists and Nazis which an irony-unaware system may not be able to distinguish from actual endorsement.

darepublic 6y ago
Someone with access to FB and it's monorepo could likely find the entry where biglebow.ski is blocked and perhaps create a PR to unblock it

blunte 6y ago

There are so many ways to have a problem with Facebook and be unable to get help. The list of ways grows... My "favorite" is if you once had a spare FB account for playing some game, and later FB has blocked that account (for inactivity, or being obviously fake _after_ they instituted the real name policy)... but you still get occasional emails from FB begging you to come back and login - your friends miss you! Of course you cannot login, and you cannot stop the fucking emails from FB. There's no process for dealing with this, so you ultimately have to write a custom filter to process these zombie FB emails. I urge everyone, no matter what your "need" to have an account on FB is, to just stop logging in. Don't delete the account... just never login again. Facebook will continue as a bad and irresponsible actor of global proportions until we collectively send it the way of MySpace.

kalium-xyz 6y ago
If you are European you can report them for this as it goes against the GDPR[0]. You can also just send an angry email to their data officer which they have to reply to by law, and enjoy the template reaction of "we are currently too busy" followed by dismissal a few months later. If you are not European you can probably still use their mechanisms for complying with the GDPR to fix this as they cant really tell who is a European citizen and who is not. [0] https://gdpr.eu/email-encryption/ https://gdpr.eu/email-encryption/
dingaling 6y ago
> Facebook will continue as a bad and irresponsible actor of global proportions I log in, I have a browse at what my acquaintances have posted, I close the tab and go on with the day. Sometimes I flick through the 'People you may know' and smile at some old real-world friends. For the vast majority of people, Facebook is a positive experience.
- Miraste 6y ago
  That's nice, but has nothing to do with whether they're a bad and irresponsible actor.
- jfengel 6y ago

richrichardsson 6y ago

A big part of this I think is due to "uncommon" TLDs. I had a joke "quiz" .website domain that was insta-blocked by Facebook for no reason and was impossible to get revoked. That was a complete waste of time when the main way I intended for it to get some traction was through Facebook shares.

keraf 6y ago
I registered a .as domain for my last name (ending in 'as') and managed to set it as my primary email on Facebook shorty before they decided to block that domain for no apparent reason. For years (until I deleted my FB account), I had a message on the top of my feed asking me to confirm my email even though it was already confirmed but I could never do it because of the block. Tried many times to get it resolved but no success. And to this day, people cannot send posts or messages that contain my domain (website or email) anywhere on Facebook and Instagram.

RickJWagner 6y ago

This aggression will not stand, man.

kalium-xyz 6y ago

One can only wonder how much the economic damage is from such small annoyances. I always have to check under the D for Dutch, N for Netherlands, and T for The when filling in my nationality or my postal address on an international form. Its a minor annoyance till you encounter very important forms without an easy way to scroll or some other broken UI making input hard.

jungletime 6y ago

There is an episode on the simpsons, which I think illustrates the problem with the modern times. Everyone overreacting to a snippet of information, without knowing what came before or after. The overreacting to the overreactions. Its two villages making up stories about what happens in the other village, and each turn, the story gets embellished. How To Cook For Forty Humans https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxI7B758XBQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxI7B758XBQ

nerdponx 6y ago
I don't get the relevance. Is this article an overreaction?
- jungletime 6y ago
  The movie revolves around misunderstanding and incomplete information. There are people on facebook trying to cause such misunderstandings using selective clips, and quotes all the time. Consider the BLM protests, most of the cases, are kind of grey area. People don't have the full information. There are much more clear cut cases around BLM could have focused on. Yet they chose these ones. Why? They pick the controversial ones, over witch people will argue endlessly. People might be rioting right now over something that is not even True.

Yhippa 6y ago

How is it that fake news, misinformation, and conspiracy theories are allowed to run wild on the platform but then VERY SERIOUS things like this are taken care of?

duxup 6y ago

>The website has all this time been incorrectly labelled “by our automated tools” as spam, according to the spokesperson. “Our apologies for the inconvenience.” It seems the large tech companies just have a policy to automate as much as possible and if it impacts some folks unfairly, that's just how it works and they've no interest in dealing with it unless it gets PR. Otherwise screw those little people. I had a domain through blogger that I registered ages ago on the blogger site. Google started emailing me that it was expiring and directed me to Gsuite.... but I don't have a Gsuite account and google didn't make one for me... The domain didn't appear in my Google domains account. Google had just pointed blogger domain users to Gsuite and called it a day. Google was no help, I never got a response from the handful of ways (none of them good) trying to reach out to them. Finally I found the old registrar google used behind the scenes and they let me renew the domain. I never heard back from google other than all the spam about my domain expiring and asking me to login to Gsuite... repeatedly.. sent to an email without a Gusite account.. someone just flipped a switch and screw everyone I guess.

PragmaticPulp 6y ago
> It seems the large tech companies just have a policy to automate as much as possible Mistakes happen at scale regardless of whether it's automated or human-controlled. Having actual humans do the work is hardly a magic bullet, because people make mistakes frequently as well. Worse yet, humans are more prone to being compromised or acting maliciously, such as in recent attacks on prominent companies. It's not so much as a policy as a necessity. Facebook's number of users is counted in the billions. They have about 50,000 users for each Facebook employee. Most importantly: People aren't paying Facebook. It's just not realistic to expect a free platform serving billions of users to have 100% perfect execution.
- cycomanic 6y ago
  I hear this argument all the time, but Facebook is one of the richest companies in the world so they could definitely afford to hire some more people that could look at complaints. They just choose not to because they don't care. If it suddenly would affect their bottom line I bet you they would hire people very quickly.

barkingcat 6y ago

This article screws around with de Zwart's name so much while complaining about another organization's screwing around of his last name is really something.

detaro 6y ago
How does it "screw around" with the name?
- tekknolagi 6y ago
  de Zwart -> De Zwart
- barkingcat 6y ago
  The the name de Zwart appears inconsistently capitalized throughout the article. If you do a matched-case search in the body text, de Zwart appears 3 times, while De Zwart occurs 7 times outside of quotation marks, and other locations (like at the beginning of a sentence) where English rules will capitalize a name. I believe to follow proper Dutch capitalization, it should be similar to, for example: Being a digital rights activist, de Zwart knows this discussion very well, so he starts to meticulously log his attempts to get clarity. However, I can't be sure if in Dutch, a lower case pre-surname is capitalized in circumstances when it's used in a sentence vs as a full name. Without the clarification of rules governing the use of such lower case surnames, I can't be exactly sure whether the capitalization is on purpose or not.
  - detaro 6y ago
    Luckily a large part of this HN discussion already goes into detail about this.
    - barkingcat 6y ago
      For example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24763789 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24763789
6y ago

prepend 6y ago

This reminds me of studying ethics from a deontological and utilitarian model. The discussion was about whether it’s better to optimize for the greater good or to have a rules based system of right and wrong. To me, utilitarian seems like the best outcome because the most people are improved. But the way to get there, I think, is through deontological methods because it’s actually unclear what actions can be taken to lead to an outcome. So trying to optimize in the short term can lead to unexpected side effects. Having a rules based system and following it even if it costs $1M to fix a $1 problem seems better in the long run because it is predictable and solves hidden problems. It seems Facebook is MLing itself into a feedback loop that is missing any core value other than “let’s make it work for 99% and not worry.” But I think this piles up little slices of technical debt until it eventually breaks.

WarOnPrivacy 6y ago

Consistent, quality content moderation at scale is impossible

cycomanic 6y ago

He should go to small claims court (or the Dutch equivalent) to get his 5 euros back. There was actually a case in Germany where the largest ISPs continously ignored a customer whom they charged too much at some point (similar order as the 5 euros) . The story ended with a court bailiff (?) going into the main ISP office and seizing a printer I believe. Big PR disaster and much higher cost then the original amount. These big companies do these things all the time calculating on people just giving up. We should take the advantage of the courts to teach some lessons as much as possible.

wyldfire 6y ago

Published under de Zwart's medium, but "Written by Reinier Kist." That's puzzling. Maybe de Zwart just kept pursuing up to the point that he paid a ghostwriter to blog something about it? Frustrating "experience", to be sure.

input_sh 6y ago
It was published in Dutch by Reiner Kist, and Hans himself translated it to English. It says so in the footer.

moron4hire 6y ago

Back when I got my driver's license in the late 90s, Pennsylvania couldn't handle Scottish surnames, so my last name ended up "MC BETH" after I wrote it on the form as "McBeth" (which is ludicrous, there have been Scots people in Pennsylvania far longer than there have been licenses). When I moved to Virginia 7 years ago, Virginia could handle it, but my PA license showed a "MC BETH", so my VA license shows "MC BETH". Before they issue the license, they give you a form to review. They warn you to check the form for errors, because errors are "serious business" with "serious consequences". So I point out the space on the form, that it is not the correct spelling of my name. The clerk got quite surly with me. It didn't matter that all the other documentation I had to submit--including my birth certificate--along with my change of residency showed "McBeth". Apparently, the PA DMV of 1998 was infallible and I'm now trying to pull some sort of fraud fastball in VA in getting that space removed.

eithed 6y ago

I was awaiting the conclusion that de Zwart started using De Zwart surname because of Facebook.

brisky 6y ago

I also had my website "reported" as suspicious in facebook. There is no official way to get more information or unblock your website. I see this as a darker pattern where facebook algorithms are tuned to block 3rd party external information content. In this way facebook is promoting sharing information only created within facebook platform.

da39a3ee 6y ago

> He immediately gets angry at Facebook messing up his name. The company changes his name to ‘Hans De Zwart’, with a capitalized D. The name seems to be spelled with a capitalized D throughout this Medium essay also.

croes 6y ago

This is the result of monopolies. The internet is meant for communication by defining protocols to connect all computers with each other. This allows everyone to participate and at the same time creates redundancy, which minimises failures. Companies like FB are a perversion of this purpose, instead of using free protocols, communication is done by a few programs. This creates the basis for censorship and forms a bottleneck or a predetermined breaking point.

techbio 6y ago

https://www.thebiglebow.ski/at-least-its-an-ethos https://www.thebiglebow.ski/at-least-its-an-ethos