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Creator of Social Fixer here. I've been around over 10 years and made it through multiple attempts to shut me down, remove my pages, and a c&d. With several hun

Creator of Social Fixer here. I've been around over 10 years and made it through multiple attempts to shut me down, remove my pages, and a c&d. With several hundred thousand users, I think they know that I will make some noise if they come after me again. ;)

cratermoon 5y ago
Awesome. What's the chance that Social Fixer could incorporate the kind of automatic unfollow discussed here without incurring the wrath of Facebook?
- mattkruse 5y ago
  I won't do features like this, partly for this reason. A feature like this hits their API through code, and that is the part that probably got it shut down. Years ago, I got a similar complaint from Facebook - that my code was calling their API repeatedly, and this was not allowed. I changed my code to not do things like this, in order to stay alive. So I avoid any features that would make repeated calls to their API to make changes on the user's behalf.
- mattkruse 5y ago
  The other reason, btw, is because I don't want to be responsible for taking "destructive" action. If a user misunderstands a feature and doesn't know why they don't see their friend in their newsfeed anymore, I don't want to be responsible for that. I will never unlike, never unfriend, never unfollow, etc. I won't even trigger positive actions automatically. This is the kind of thing Facebook really cracks down on, and because it's very fragile, a change in their API could cause the wrong behavior from a browser extension. It's not worth it.
  - cratermoon 5y ago
    > If a user misunderstands a feature and doesn't know why they don't see their friend in their newsfeed anymore, I don't want to be responsible for that. Oh that's a gem. It's so rare in the field to see developers thinking in terms of "what if my code does something the user doesn't expect?" and putting into practice the principle of least surprise. So much software seems to want to blame the user for doing it wrong, it's good to see a different approach.

cratermoon 5y ago

Awesome. What's the chance that Social Fixer could incorporate the kind of automatic unfollow discussed here without incurring the wrath of Facebook?

mattkruse 5y ago
I won't do features like this, partly for this reason. A feature like this hits their API through code, and that is the part that probably got it shut down. Years ago, I got a similar complaint from Facebook - that my code was calling their API repeatedly, and this was not allowed. I changed my code to not do things like this, in order to stay alive. So I avoid any features that would make repeated calls to their API to make changes on the user's behalf.
mattkruse 5y ago
The other reason, btw, is because I don't want to be responsible for taking "destructive" action. If a user misunderstands a feature and doesn't know why they don't see their friend in their newsfeed anymore, I don't want to be responsible for that. I will never unlike, never unfriend, never unfollow, etc. I won't even trigger positive actions automatically. This is the kind of thing Facebook really cracks down on, and because it's very fragile, a change in their API could cause the wrong behavior from a browser extension. It's not worth it.
- cratermoon 5y ago
  > If a user misunderstands a feature and doesn't know why they don't see their friend in their newsfeed anymore, I don't want to be responsible for that. Oh that's a gem. It's so rare in the field to see developers thinking in terms of "what if my code does something the user doesn't expect?" and putting into practice the principle of least surprise. So much software seems to want to blame the user for doing it wrong, it's good to see a different approach.