4 ms·

Hi, fb engineer here. This is exactly what's going on. If you recall, there were several articles written a few months back pertaining to comment spam, and very

by lbrandy 14y ago

Hi, fb engineer here. This is exactly what's going on. If you recall, there were several articles written a few months back pertaining to comment spam, and very low quality comments (ascii art or 'LOOOOOL!!!') from subscribers. This is part of an effort to curb that and has likely gone awry. It only affects subscriber -> subscribee comments.

thespin 14y ago
So FB tries to filter out ASCII art. It sounds to me like FB is trying to win over advertisers who really are not interested in the web, except to the extent they can profit from it. And they may learn FB has led them to believe there is much more potential than the results actually show. Meanwhile, the "consumers" using the web are generally interested in it. That includes ASCII art and LOL, as a means of communication. And not simply to discuss, purchase products and services. FB is going to fade away. It's just a matter of time. Because their motives are becoming more and more clear to even non-technical users, these motives are antithetical to the social (cf. commercial) premise of the internet, and they cannot maintain a monopoly on communication through the web, excluding other avenues by being "the only option". Couple this with advertisers who are still patiently waiting for results, results which will never come. How can you call this anything other than censorship? There is no profanity, no objectionable content whatsoever in the post. It's not "isolated", it's "targeted".
- untog 14y ago
  I think that's an overwhelmingly negative perspective. Facebook was (for me, at least) a draw initially because it wasn't drowning in crap like MySpace was. It was a locked down experience, and everyone benefitted from it. In all honesty, I don't see this as a dramatic move away from that idea.
  - thespin 14y ago
    The MySpace interface was an abomination. The fact that users would tolerate it says something about the standard one has to meet to hold an audience. It's not very high. FB has a clean interface, generally, but it's what's going on "behind the scenes" that is at issue here.
    - chc 14y ago
      The MySpace interface in and of itself was OK, especially for the time when it was made. It's what MySpace allowed users to do with it that was an abomination.
    - Zimahl 14y ago
      I'm not sure why you got downvoted for calling the MySpace interface 'an abomination'. It's hard to find a better word for it. MySpace was very weird in that it seemed like they didn't want you to alter your page. I know that statement seems odd, but there wasn't an easy way to do this. To make changes they didn't offer a UI to set up your own CSS or simply changes colors/backgrounds/etc without CSS, you essentially used JS injection on a couple fields to get the page to look like you wanted. If they had limited what people could do it, or gave them an easier avenue to do it, MySpace might not have lost as much traffic once the much 'prettier' Facebook came out.
      - thespin 14y ago
        To understand why MySpace was designed like it was, perhaps it's helpful to look at the man behind the orginal MySpace: it's the guy behind Demand Media. They own the domain name registrar eNom and Google SEO operations like eHow. His idea is to churn out millions of pages of primarily machine-generated "content". Very little human input is required. This is enough to fool the search engine that it's what people want. Because the generated pages reflect what the search data says people are searching for. But as anyone who has opened one of these pages knows, it has a certain "feel" to it. It vacuous. It's cheap. It's also effective. He earns a few pennies by having gotten you to look at the page, and once that's done, it matters little what you do or what you think next. Mission accomplished. In the aggregate, this design makes him money. If you understand how a company like eNom makes money it also arguably fits with this sort of mass production idea. It may be that MySpace was designed around the idea of mass production of "user-generated" pages. As a sort of fly trap to catch web surfers and searchers, similar to the way eHow or eNom would. Get users to help generate the pages. Not much input is needed. Just a little. This is just how I see it. I could be wrong.
- mkjones 14y ago
  Another FB engineer here - I actually work on the system that caused this false positive. You're right that if we were actually trying to stop constructive discussion from happening, that would be bad. We're definitely not trying to do that - in fact, our goal is the exact opposite. Similarly, if we let through blatantly malicious or spammy comments, I think that would be bad as well. While I wish I could say we were perfect at stopping spam, the reality is that no spam classification system is perfect. Sometimes we err too far on the conservative side, and spam gets through. Sometimes we err too far on the aggressive side, and good content is incorrectly blocked. That's what happened here - it turned out one of our spam classifiers was a little too aggressive, and we've turned it off.
  - waterlesscloud 14y ago
    A laudable goal, but for what definition of "constructive"? And PLEASE don't tell me that you guys think it will be the same definition for every site.
- taligent 14y ago
  I think you need to adjust that tin-foil hat of yours. Facebook isn't going anywhere. And it is because of decisions like this that it will continue to grow. People want a high SNR for comments. It encourages you to contribute more to a discussion not less. If you want ASCII, LOL nonsense stick to 4chan.
- k-mcgrady 14y ago
  It sounds like you've gotten it completely wrong. He didn't mean people can't use ASCII art of write 'lol'. If you have an account and have a lot of subscribers you will notice many comments (obviously spam) which write lol, hello, hi etc and are not contributing anything to the conversation. These are people that just want to expose their account in as many places as possible (spammers). Facebook aren't trying to stop people using phrases like 'lol'. In this case the filter made a mistake. Big deal. They need to continue to improve it. Anyone calling this censorship is idiotic.
  - thespin 14y ago
    Are you focussing on the post in question, and what it says, or are you just focussing on the notion of a spam filter and silly comments? No one is arguing against spam filters. FB sends a lot of email that serves no purpose other than to try to get a user to log in. Is that "spam"? Would FB be opposed if an email provider filtered all that mail out of the user's mailbox? The question is: Does the post in question appear to contribute anything to a conversation? Or not? Perhaps it appears to promote other websites and seems a bit short on "content"? What makes it "spam"? Look at the words the post contains. If FB is really having trouble with spam, then that speaks to the design of FB. Does every FB user need to use a website on the open internet, that any spammer can access, to contact their friends and family? The FB employee says they shut off the filter. I think that speaks for itself.
jacquesm 14y ago
If you want to get rid of spam simply ban programmatic posting to walls from apps. What users get up to is a lot less bad than what apps do. And get rid of the 'like' un-feature. That will go a long way to restoring sanity.
- mikescar 14y ago
  Why ban API use by applications? Wouldn't that kill a large part of Facebook's valuation? Users can turn email off for all or individual apps, and people could only add apps which use their information more responsibly. I'm not a FB user, and in a more ideal situation the FB 'like' button would not be so heavy--you can't really remove it for sites because it's a lifeline, but for site performance it's slow.
- jsprinkles 14y ago
  So basically, get rid of Facebook, Jacques?
  - jacquesm 14y ago
    Fine by me.
heyitsnick 14y ago
I'm confused here. Posting "LOL!" is not spam in any way, at least how i define spam. It might not subjectively be appropriate (if it's not appropriate to find it funny), it's debateably irrelevant (if it is not important who finds it funny). But it's not spam. Spam is broadly defined as unsolicited bulk advertising. An example spam comment would be "LOL! Also check out this great pharmaceutical company: xxx". The latter is certainly something that should be filtered out, if it's irrelevant advertising that marketers are using to peddle their crap. It's mostly unsubjective and uncontextual and its appropriate for filters to automatically detect. But filtering out the former is a form of censorship that is often best left to humans (like downvotes to bury bad comments). I don't think this should be the job of the comments system to determine what is considered "appropriate" or "beneficial to the discussion." A "LOL" or ASCII art image or "no u" or any other meme can be anything from a well-timed ironic offhand jab, an appropriate affirmation or response, to totally irrelevant and inappropriate noise. It depends on topic, context, parent, and existing noise in the thread and is inherently objective.
- ojbyrne 14y ago
  So what if you post not one "LOL" but thousands or millions of "LOL"s? Furthermore, what if the whole purpose of you posting millions of "LOL"s was to defeat spam filters. Would it be spam then?
  - heyitsnick 14y ago
    Yes ban accounts that are clearly abusing comments with thousands or millions of "LOL". No need to detect on individual comments if something is deemed "appropriate" or not.

by lbrandy 14y ago

thespin 14y ago

So FB tries to filter out ASCII art. It sounds to me like FB is trying to win over advertisers who really are not interested in the web, except to the extent they can profit from it. And they may learn FB has led them to believe there is much more potential than the results actually show. Meanwhile, the "consumers" using the web are generally interested in it. That includes ASCII art and LOL, as a means of communication. And not simply to discuss, purchase products and services. FB is going to fade away. It's just a matter of time. Because their motives are becoming more and more clear to even non-technical users, these motives are antithetical to the social (cf. commercial) premise of the internet, and they cannot maintain a monopoly on communication through the web, excluding other avenues by being "the only option". Couple this with advertisers who are still patiently waiting for results, results which will never come. How can you call this anything other than censorship? There is no profanity, no objectionable content whatsoever in the post. It's not "isolated", it's "targeted".

untog 14y ago
I think that's an overwhelmingly negative perspective. Facebook was (for me, at least) a draw initially because it wasn't drowning in crap like MySpace was. It was a locked down experience, and everyone benefitted from it. In all honesty, I don't see this as a dramatic move away from that idea.
- thespin 14y ago
  The MySpace interface was an abomination. The fact that users would tolerate it says something about the standard one has to meet to hold an audience. It's not very high. FB has a clean interface, generally, but it's what's going on "behind the scenes" that is at issue here.
  - chc 14y ago
    The MySpace interface in and of itself was OK, especially for the time when it was made. It's what MySpace allowed users to do with it that was an abomination.
  - Zimahl 14y ago
    I'm not sure why you got downvoted for calling the MySpace interface 'an abomination'. It's hard to find a better word for it. MySpace was very weird in that it seemed like they didn't want you to alter your page. I know that statement seems odd, but there wasn't an easy way to do this. To make changes they didn't offer a UI to set up your own CSS or simply changes colors/backgrounds/etc without CSS, you essentially used JS injection on a couple fields to get the page to look like you wanted. If they had limited what people could do it, or gave them an easier avenue to do it, MySpace might not have lost as much traffic once the much 'prettier' Facebook came out.
    - thespin 14y ago
      To understand why MySpace was designed like it was, perhaps it's helpful to look at the man behind the orginal MySpace: it's the guy behind Demand Media. They own the domain name registrar eNom and Google SEO operations like eHow. His idea is to churn out millions of pages of primarily machine-generated "content". Very little human input is required. This is enough to fool the search engine that it's what people want. Because the generated pages reflect what the search data says people are searching for. But as anyone who has opened one of these pages knows, it has a certain "feel" to it. It vacuous. It's cheap. It's also effective. He earns a few pennies by having gotten you to look at the page, and once that's done, it matters little what you do or what you think next. Mission accomplished. In the aggregate, this design makes him money. If you understand how a company like eNom makes money it also arguably fits with this sort of mass production idea. It may be that MySpace was designed around the idea of mass production of "user-generated" pages. As a sort of fly trap to catch web surfers and searchers, similar to the way eHow or eNom would. Get users to help generate the pages. Not much input is needed. Just a little. This is just how I see it. I could be wrong.
mkjones 14y ago
Another FB engineer here - I actually work on the system that caused this false positive. You're right that if we were actually trying to stop constructive discussion from happening, that would be bad. We're definitely not trying to do that - in fact, our goal is the exact opposite. Similarly, if we let through blatantly malicious or spammy comments, I think that would be bad as well. While I wish I could say we were perfect at stopping spam, the reality is that no spam classification system is perfect. Sometimes we err too far on the conservative side, and spam gets through. Sometimes we err too far on the aggressive side, and good content is incorrectly blocked. That's what happened here - it turned out one of our spam classifiers was a little too aggressive, and we've turned it off.
- waterlesscloud 14y ago
  A laudable goal, but for what definition of "constructive"? And PLEASE don't tell me that you guys think it will be the same definition for every site.
taligent 14y ago
I think you need to adjust that tin-foil hat of yours. Facebook isn't going anywhere. And it is because of decisions like this that it will continue to grow. People want a high SNR for comments. It encourages you to contribute more to a discussion not less. If you want ASCII, LOL nonsense stick to 4chan.
k-mcgrady 14y ago
It sounds like you've gotten it completely wrong. He didn't mean people can't use ASCII art of write 'lol'. If you have an account and have a lot of subscribers you will notice many comments (obviously spam) which write lol, hello, hi etc and are not contributing anything to the conversation. These are people that just want to expose their account in as many places as possible (spammers). Facebook aren't trying to stop people using phrases like 'lol'. In this case the filter made a mistake. Big deal. They need to continue to improve it. Anyone calling this censorship is idiotic.
- thespin 14y ago
  Are you focussing on the post in question, and what it says, or are you just focussing on the notion of a spam filter and silly comments? No one is arguing against spam filters. FB sends a lot of email that serves no purpose other than to try to get a user to log in. Is that "spam"? Would FB be opposed if an email provider filtered all that mail out of the user's mailbox? The question is: Does the post in question appear to contribute anything to a conversation? Or not? Perhaps it appears to promote other websites and seems a bit short on "content"? What makes it "spam"? Look at the words the post contains. If FB is really having trouble with spam, then that speaks to the design of FB. Does every FB user need to use a website on the open internet, that any spammer can access, to contact their friends and family? The FB employee says they shut off the filter. I think that speaks for itself.

jacquesm 14y ago

If you want to get rid of spam simply ban programmatic posting to walls from apps. What users get up to is a lot less bad than what apps do. And get rid of the 'like' un-feature. That will go a long way to restoring sanity.

mikescar 14y ago
Why ban API use by applications? Wouldn't that kill a large part of Facebook's valuation? Users can turn email off for all or individual apps, and people could only add apps which use their information more responsibly. I'm not a FB user, and in a more ideal situation the FB 'like' button would not be so heavy--you can't really remove it for sites because it's a lifeline, but for site performance it's slow.
jsprinkles 14y ago
So basically, get rid of Facebook, Jacques?
- jacquesm 14y ago
  Fine by me.

heyitsnick 14y ago

I'm confused here. Posting "LOL!" is not spam in any way, at least how i define spam. It might not subjectively be appropriate (if it's not appropriate to find it funny), it's debateably irrelevant (if it is not important who finds it funny). But it's not spam. Spam is broadly defined as unsolicited bulk advertising. An example spam comment would be "LOL! Also check out this great pharmaceutical company: xxx". The latter is certainly something that should be filtered out, if it's irrelevant advertising that marketers are using to peddle their crap. It's mostly unsubjective and uncontextual and its appropriate for filters to automatically detect. But filtering out the former is a form of censorship that is often best left to humans (like downvotes to bury bad comments). I don't think this should be the job of the comments system to determine what is considered "appropriate" or "beneficial to the discussion." A "LOL" or ASCII art image or "no u" or any other meme can be anything from a well-timed ironic offhand jab, an appropriate affirmation or response, to totally irrelevant and inappropriate noise. It depends on topic, context, parent, and existing noise in the thread and is inherently objective.

ojbyrne 14y ago
So what if you post not one "LOL" but thousands or millions of "LOL"s? Furthermore, what if the whole purpose of you posting millions of "LOL"s was to defeat spam filters. Would it be spam then?
- heyitsnick 14y ago
  Yes ban accounts that are clearly abusing comments with thousands or millions of "LOL". No need to detect on individual comments if something is deemed "appropriate" or not.