7 ms·

I'm seeing an unusual amount of reddit style small comments on this outage, which I find strange. They're short and in the vein of "Facebook is down: good" or "

by GrifMD 5y ago

I'm seeing an unusual amount of reddit style small comments on this outage, which I find strange. They're short and in the vein of "Facebook is down: good" or "Facebook is back up: damn nothing good lasts forever" I understand the distain for Facebook as a business, but still this is pretty low effort.

jimsimmons 5y ago
This is a live event unfolding and that’s pretty much all there’s to it. So it’s like a twitch chat. Deeper discussions will follow when the postmortems come out
quadrifoliate 5y ago
Maybe it's because Facebook has become more than a business and has wormed its way into places where it has no business being? A ton of small city governments in the US do announcements and such on Facebook these days. One columnist is advocating giving the a seats at the United Nations, and does not get immediately laughed out of the room by the editor [1]. It's really hard to practically escape their reach, all the "How I left Facebook and it was really great" posts notwithstanding. Being digital Henry David Thoreaus is not a scalable strategy. So I tend to take the low effort comments as a visceral articulation of the relief felt at knowing that the platform and the conspiracy theories and such spreading on it are...gone, albeit only temporarily. I must confess that I myself felt this kind of relief. I secretly hoped that it would stay down; and that we'd get to rebuild a kinder, more honest, and open social media platform or platforms. -------------------- [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-10-03/give-amazon-and-facebook-a-seat-at-the-united-nations https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-10-03/give-a...
- runawaybottle 5y ago
  And how simple it actually was, just turn off the sites. Like a giant global, societal parental control setting. Here I thought that this snake had wrapped itself entirely around all of us, but it really didn’t. All we have to do is ‘flick’, turn it off. Body image issues on Insta? Not today kids. How simple some of our biggest problems are to solve. It does make one hopeful.
- drstewart 5y ago
  >So I tend to take the low effort comments as a visceral articulation of the relief felt at knowing that the platform and the conspiracy theories and such spreading on it are...gone, albeit only temporarily. That's funny, because most of what I read while Facebook was down was conspiracy theories about Facebook being down.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- systemvoltage 5y ago
  Sure, this might be true but you're diverting from the point OP is making. May be it's that HN has lost it's ability to have a civil discourse without people downvoting you for the slightest challenging opinion, let alone contrarian viewpoints (which would be flagged). It used to be not like that just two years ago. It is very much reflecting a low effort echo-chamber.
  - quadrifoliate 5y ago
    > Sure, this might be true but you're diverting from the point OP is making. I don't see how? OP is saying that the low-effort comments are more frequent on this post than on other HN posts ("...an unusual amount of reddit style small comments on this outage"). I'm agreeing with that assertion, and positing a possible explanation for it ("people felt a fundamental sort of relief, and expressed it through offhand comments"). Your assertion, on the other hand, seems to be that these low-effort comments are present on all posts – which seems to me to be, if anything, more of a diversion from OP's point of view.
    - systemvoltage 5y ago
      > Your assertion, on the other hand, seems to be that these low-effort comments are present on all posts – which seems to me to be, if anything, more of a diversion from OP's point of view. Don't put words in my mouth and this is not what I said. I just see this as an ad hominem attack, ironically diverting the criticism of HN (a factual observation in my view) towards my persons and my ulterior motives.
- ngold 5y ago
  How private companies like Twitter and Facebook took over official government communication is rather lazy, and destructive to an open society.
- throwaway468236 5y ago
  In the UK the COVID vaccine was offered nationally through a government site but you could get it sooner and closer through local GPs. They could stop once they had covered the old and vulnerable though. In my area, they carried on for a while but only if you requested an appointment in the comments of a private Facebook group. I wasn't thrilled by the delay, but also thought the assumption of vaccine hesitancy from others in the meantime and hard to navigate process could put some off entirely. But for everyone else, what a sign-up incentive!
  - quadrifoliate 5y ago
    Yes, I saw Facebook being a gateway (and a potential roadblock) to requesting vaccines from some US pharmacies last year as well. You had to post in the comments to reserve one or make an appointment.
fosk 5y ago
After all, Facebook is down, so those comments have to go somewhere.
OJFord 5y ago
Yes, and as a submission I don't really see the point in it? Especially when it's not even a status page permalink (couldn't be, that was down too apparently). Post mortems very welcome of course. It's just karma bait as far as I can tell, and as you say, almost entirely uninteresting comments. There are/were a couple of other at least briefly front page submissions around it of e.g. twitter/reddit potentially-leaked minor bits of info, and krebsonsecurity post; I'm sure the few informed more interesting comments would've found their way to those without a 'it is down, here is a link that will soon be up again' mega-thread. Which leads me to a meta-point on this submission: I've flagged it, because AIUI it's customary that the initial 'down' submission gets renamed 'was down', rather than having the two 'down'/'up' threads.
- callalex 5y ago
  Useless comments don’t make the topic being discussed useless to know about. This outage has arguably impacted more human lives than any other in computing history. I can’t back that up with facts yet, but you must agree it is a notable event for this community that has had ripples across the internet and real life.
  - OJFord 5y ago
    Sure, that seems a bit dramatic, but basically sure; I did say the other contentful posts are fine of course IMO, there's a blog post from Cloudflare now too, it's just the initial [x is down](currently dead link) posts that I don't like/see a need for. 99% they just get used as 'is it just me' checks, and there are dedicated sites for that.
spelunker 5y ago
You should see the current top comment!
literallyaduck 5y ago
The public is tired of being gaslighted and lied to by large corporations. The whistle-blower only brought to light what we have known previously, Facebook is a net loss for humanity. Letting people contect with family and long lost friends is good. Purposefully pitting people against each other, human experimentation https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/06/28/facebook-manipulated-689003-users-emotions-for-science/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/06/28/facebook... , creating hateful echo chambers, claiming to be the source of all facts, manipulating users for engagement and ad revenue is bad. The low effort posts could signify a loss of cultural cohesion or new accounts, but Facebook and its children fading from the public would be a gift to many addicts.
- mahathu 5y ago
  In Germany, each year a committee of linguists select an "un-word of the year". "Gaslit" should be the internet unword of the decade. It has no scientific relevance and shouldn't be used when perfectly fine alternatives like "lied to" or "manipulated" exist. They just don't sound as dramatic I guess.
  - 0x4d464d48 5y ago
    What's wrong with the idea of treating gaslighting as a certain kind of manipulation?
  - batch12 5y ago
    I agree that the misuse is annoying-- and a Lot of people misuse the word. However, gaslighting has a specific meaning not quite covered by "lied to" or "manipulated".
  - gnulinux 5y ago
    It seems like your comment originates from a misunderstanding of what 'to gaslight' means? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting Gaslighting is a specific form of manipulation that uses intentionally false narratives.
- wellthisishn 5y ago
whimsicalism 5y ago
Interesting how low quality comments seem to be correlated with FB going down :)
- yuuu 5y ago
  order corn
  - yuuu 5y ago
    sudo order corn
wellthisishn 5y ago
How much do they need to elaborate?
abdel_nasser 5y ago
i was shocked to see videogamedunkey on the front page of hackernews a few weeks ago. there is a huge influx of redditors in the past year and a half. why do you think the admins introduced classic mode? its because they are acutely aware of this, despite constant denials, and are trying to prevent the site from becoming, well, facebook eventually. full of LCD.
LudwigNagasena 5y ago
There are probably lots of people who have Facebook addiciton and need help. For some reason they channel their hate towards Facebook instead of themselves.
ehsankia 5y ago
The top comment right now is about how the whole world feels like a better place during the downtime. Such a heavy eye roll reading that. We get it, most of us don't like FB either, but that's such a circlejerky comment.
EastOfTruth 5y ago
HN had availability issued int he same time frame, so that isn't too surprising...
skizm 5y ago
Did HN kill signups during this outage? They used to turn off signups when reddit went down a while back, not sure if this practice is still in place or not.

by GrifMD 5y ago

jimsimmons 5y ago

This is a live event unfolding and that’s pretty much all there’s to it. So it’s like a twitch chat. Deeper discussions will follow when the postmortems come out

quadrifoliate 5y ago

Maybe it's because Facebook has become more than a business and has wormed its way into places where it has no business being? A ton of small city governments in the US do announcements and such on Facebook these days. One columnist is advocating giving the a seats at the United Nations, and does not get immediately laughed out of the room by the editor [1]. It's really hard to practically escape their reach, all the "How I left Facebook and it was really great" posts notwithstanding. Being digital Henry David Thoreaus is not a scalable strategy. So I tend to take the low effort comments as a visceral articulation of the relief felt at knowing that the platform and the conspiracy theories and such spreading on it are...gone, albeit only temporarily. I must confess that I myself felt this kind of relief. I secretly hoped that it would stay down; and that we'd get to rebuild a kinder, more honest, and open social media platform or platforms. -------------------- [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-10-03/give-amazon-and-facebook-a-seat-at-the-united-nations https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-10-03/give-a...

runawaybottle 5y ago
And how simple it actually was, just turn off the sites. Like a giant global, societal parental control setting. Here I thought that this snake had wrapped itself entirely around all of us, but it really didn’t. All we have to do is ‘flick’, turn it off. Body image issues on Insta? Not today kids. How simple some of our biggest problems are to solve. It does make one hopeful.
drstewart 5y ago
>So I tend to take the low effort comments as a visceral articulation of the relief felt at knowing that the platform and the conspiracy theories and such spreading on it are...gone, albeit only temporarily. That's funny, because most of what I read while Facebook was down was conspiracy theories about Facebook being down.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
systemvoltage 5y ago
Sure, this might be true but you're diverting from the point OP is making. May be it's that HN has lost it's ability to have a civil discourse without people downvoting you for the slightest challenging opinion, let alone contrarian viewpoints (which would be flagged). It used to be not like that just two years ago. It is very much reflecting a low effort echo-chamber.
- quadrifoliate 5y ago
  > Sure, this might be true but you're diverting from the point OP is making. I don't see how? OP is saying that the low-effort comments are more frequent on this post than on other HN posts ("...an unusual amount of reddit style small comments on this outage"). I'm agreeing with that assertion, and positing a possible explanation for it ("people felt a fundamental sort of relief, and expressed it through offhand comments"). Your assertion, on the other hand, seems to be that these low-effort comments are present on all posts – which seems to me to be, if anything, more of a diversion from OP's point of view.
  - systemvoltage 5y ago
    > Your assertion, on the other hand, seems to be that these low-effort comments are present on all posts – which seems to me to be, if anything, more of a diversion from OP's point of view. Don't put words in my mouth and this is not what I said. I just see this as an ad hominem attack, ironically diverting the criticism of HN (a factual observation in my view) towards my persons and my ulterior motives.
ngold 5y ago
How private companies like Twitter and Facebook took over official government communication is rather lazy, and destructive to an open society.
throwaway468236 5y ago
In the UK the COVID vaccine was offered nationally through a government site but you could get it sooner and closer through local GPs. They could stop once they had covered the old and vulnerable though. In my area, they carried on for a while but only if you requested an appointment in the comments of a private Facebook group. I wasn't thrilled by the delay, but also thought the assumption of vaccine hesitancy from others in the meantime and hard to navigate process could put some off entirely. But for everyone else, what a sign-up incentive!
- quadrifoliate 5y ago
  Yes, I saw Facebook being a gateway (and a potential roadblock) to requesting vaccines from some US pharmacies last year as well. You had to post in the comments to reserve one or make an appointment.

fosk 5y ago

After all, Facebook is down, so those comments have to go somewhere.

OJFord 5y ago

Yes, and as a submission I don't really see the point in it? Especially when it's not even a status page permalink (couldn't be, that was down too apparently). Post mortems very welcome of course. It's just karma bait as far as I can tell, and as you say, almost entirely uninteresting comments. There are/were a couple of other at least briefly front page submissions around it of e.g. twitter/reddit potentially-leaked minor bits of info, and krebsonsecurity post; I'm sure the few informed more interesting comments would've found their way to those without a 'it is down, here is a link that will soon be up again' mega-thread. Which leads me to a meta-point on this submission: I've flagged it, because AIUI it's customary that the initial 'down' submission gets renamed 'was down', rather than having the two 'down'/'up' threads.

callalex 5y ago
Useless comments don’t make the topic being discussed useless to know about. This outage has arguably impacted more human lives than any other in computing history. I can’t back that up with facts yet, but you must agree it is a notable event for this community that has had ripples across the internet and real life.
- OJFord 5y ago
  Sure, that seems a bit dramatic, but basically sure; I did say the other contentful posts are fine of course IMO, there's a blog post from Cloudflare now too, it's just the initial [x is down](currently dead link) posts that I don't like/see a need for. 99% they just get used as 'is it just me' checks, and there are dedicated sites for that.

spelunker 5y ago

You should see the current top comment!

literallyaduck 5y ago

The public is tired of being gaslighted and lied to by large corporations. The whistle-blower only brought to light what we have known previously, Facebook is a net loss for humanity. Letting people contect with family and long lost friends is good. Purposefully pitting people against each other, human experimentation https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/06/28/facebook-manipulated-689003-users-emotions-for-science/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/06/28/facebook... , creating hateful echo chambers, claiming to be the source of all facts, manipulating users for engagement and ad revenue is bad. The low effort posts could signify a loss of cultural cohesion or new accounts, but Facebook and its children fading from the public would be a gift to many addicts.

mahathu 5y ago
In Germany, each year a committee of linguists select an "un-word of the year". "Gaslit" should be the internet unword of the decade. It has no scientific relevance and shouldn't be used when perfectly fine alternatives like "lied to" or "manipulated" exist. They just don't sound as dramatic I guess.
- 0x4d464d48 5y ago
  What's wrong with the idea of treating gaslighting as a certain kind of manipulation?
- batch12 5y ago
  I agree that the misuse is annoying-- and a Lot of people misuse the word. However, gaslighting has a specific meaning not quite covered by "lied to" or "manipulated".
- gnulinux 5y ago
  It seems like your comment originates from a misunderstanding of what 'to gaslight' means? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting Gaslighting is a specific form of manipulation that uses intentionally false narratives.
wellthisishn 5y ago

whimsicalism 5y ago

Interesting how low quality comments seem to be correlated with FB going down :)

yuuu 5y ago
order corn
- yuuu 5y ago
  sudo order corn

wellthisishn 5y ago

How much do they need to elaborate?

abdel_nasser 5y ago

i was shocked to see videogamedunkey on the front page of hackernews a few weeks ago. there is a huge influx of redditors in the past year and a half. why do you think the admins introduced classic mode? its because they are acutely aware of this, despite constant denials, and are trying to prevent the site from becoming, well, facebook eventually. full of LCD.

LudwigNagasena 5y ago

There are probably lots of people who have Facebook addiciton and need help. For some reason they channel their hate towards Facebook instead of themselves.

ehsankia 5y ago

The top comment right now is about how the whole world feels like a better place during the downtime. Such a heavy eye roll reading that. We get it, most of us don't like FB either, but that's such a circlejerky comment.

EastOfTruth 5y ago

HN had availability issued int he same time frame, so that isn't too surprising...

skizm 5y ago

Did HN kill signups during this outage? They used to turn off signups when reddit went down a while back, not sure if this practice is still in place or not.