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Comment by greg___ | Hacker News Reader

I have visited a local community center event website for 15 years. They recently moved over to Facebook. Their feed is public. If I don't have the FB app or am not logged into FB, it's almost as if there is an entire division of losers, sitting around at Facebook cooking up ways to make me login or install the app. From are you a robot unreadable captcha's, to denying the page exists, to limiting the number of posts, limiting readable post content, its ridiculous.

Whether they are king or not, all I am ever going to remember them for is taking a gigantic shit over what the Internet is supposed to mean.

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I tried viewing the Facebook page for my local goban meetup recently to check on a schedule, and FB put a giant floating translucent white box over the bottom half of my screen with a single "login" button in the middle of it. So I could see there was content below but it was incredibly hard to read. There was not even an "X" button to close it. What it was saying was "join our website or get the hell out".

I understand enforcing login for write operations, since it's obviously required, but they really do seem to have no regard for the original ideals of the internet. They're not alone; Quora and others have done similarly stupid shit.

These companies are all supposedly started by hackers who love the internet and technology, but it's sad to see capitalism take hold in such an ugly way.

I've found Kill Sticky [1] to be an incredibly useful bookmarket lately. It finds any DOM element with "position: fixed" and deletes it. Wish I didn't need to use it so often, but here we are.

Sometimes for annoying popups covering content, sometimes for the sidebar of brightly colored floating social widgets, sometimes just the enormous fixed banner that continues to waste screen real estate after you've scrolled down.

I use it a lot on my laptop and haven't tried JS bookmarklets in mobile browsers, but I'd hope that they work by now?

[1] https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/

That is brilliant. For Mobile Safari, copy the bookmarklet source, create a "dummy" bookmark, then go back and edit it. Delete the URL and type in `javascript:` and paste the JS.

bookmarklet(s) LIVES :D thanks for this, will be added shortly

p/s: we need more bookmarklets that removes annoyance like this

Even for read operations : forcing you to log in is the only way Facebook has to enforce the non-public privacy setting the content creator may have set.

Conversely, anyone with or without an account can view public Facebook posts.

This wasn't them respecting a privacy setting. The content was still very accessible, just inconveniently so.

> These companies are all supposedly started by hackers who love the internet and technology

I think the word hacker was misappropriated by assholes in Silicon Valley somewhere around the mid-aughts.

The original hacker ethic was opposed to suits!

http://www.hacker-dictionary.com/terms/suit

>original ideals of the internet

original ideals of the _World Wide Web_, to be more specific.

Pinterest does this as well. Its lame but effective. Supply and Demand is an amazing concept. If FB or Pinterest wasn't as popular/needed then this type of activity would be frowned upon.

The problem isn't Facebook. The problem is that the community center decided that maintaining a website wasn't worth the cost and/or the effort.

or maybe it's a failure of tech in general that maintaining a website isn't worth the cost and/or the effort ;)

That was a glib remark, but in all seriousness ... for the average non-technical user, who's friends are all on Facebook, their event and group system is a godsend. Non-FB solutions should realize that and figure out ways to make more accessible (and cheap ... aka free) systems

Squarespace is apparently pretty popular for small websites and it's not especially expensive--but it's not free and I appreciate that the difference between free and $10-20/month is a big difference for a community group or other small non-commercial organization/individual that just wants a page up on the Web.

My understanding is that Wix is great for free design (though its a freemium business model, I believe). Though, I'm not sure of the hosting structure.

Yes, and Facebook users are not aware that they are paying for Facebook, so the price comparison is brutal.

Many parts of the general populace don't care about the whole "if you're not paying, you're the product" mentality. They happily ignore as many ads as you want to throw at them, as long as they can coordinate little timmy's birthday party.

The world is complicated :)

I help admin a local org's website. We cross post to our site, meetup.com, and our facebook page. Each sucks in its own special way. I wouldn't expect a non-tech to figure this crap out.

This.

File a polite complaint that they are excluding members of the community unnecessarily, and that alternatives like meetup.com exist so you don't even need to run your own web server.

The likely answer will be : "well, you could sign up to Facebook just as easily as you want us to sign up to meetup.com. Except, everyone is already on Facebook"

Except, of course, in this example not everyone is on Facebook.

yeah, but more people are on Facebook than Meetup.

Meetup is worse than Facebook. Meetup sends emails.

And Facebook doesn't?

it's a setting.

It's definitely a setting on meetup too.

Growth was crucial in the early days of facebook. They were laser focused on growth, because they knew they had to move fast to destroy all the competition. Now it's retention which is extremely crucial for them. As soon as users start leaking, there is no going back.

>it's almost as if there is an entire division..., sitting around at Facebook cooking up ways to make me login or install the app

that is exactly correct

sadly the "closed garden" concept is the trend these days..

days? I would say years.

Yeah, that's actually what that expression means.

What is the Internet supposed to be mean? Because if the FB site for your community center is able to reach more community members through FB than on their own that's kind of awesome. A free service is making your community a better place!

That's a fair question. I think there is a widely held consensus among most techy people on a set of values/ideas that were instrumental to the birth anf growth of the internet, and which are a core part of what makes it one of the most amazing human inventions ever.

Openness and accessibility are among the most important internet values. Companies that create closed gardens violate these values. Many people believe that this erosion of openness for the sake of short-term profits (2-3 years) will lead to a weaker and all around worse internet in the long run (5-20 years).

The community center people are seduced by the ease of creating a FB site without paying any cash, while likely not realizing that it's harming their community by excluding people.

Of course, being too dogmatic about values is never good. But I would argue this is a case where it's good to stand up for accessibility.

Please stop perpetuating the myth that it's free, it's not.

It is just as free to use as any other website with ads is.

That's actually not true. Most websites with ads don't have a huge network effect[1] that causes and strengthens a monopoly with the potential for abuse that that brings with it. Also, most websites with ads are not in a position to create a comprehensive database of the social structure of the world.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect

Cool. It is still free to use though.

No, not if you are using any economically sensible definition of cost (and thus of "free").

"I have to directly pay x units of currency" is not a useful measure of cost. There are lots of ways in which either you can be paying costs indirectly, or in which other people are forced to pay costs caused by you, neither of which really makes much sense to call "free".

Network effects are what economists call an externality: A cost (or a benefit in the case of positive externalities) that is paid for by people who didn't participate in the decision that led to that cost. Also, monopolistic structures and concentrations of power often have long-term consequences that lead to what economists call opportunity costs: A monopoly that hinders innovation, for example, might end up preventing a beneficial technological development, or even just lower prices due to competition.

That people often confuse "immediate payment" with "costs" is exactly the misconception that companies like facebook like to use to hide the costs.

Communities are choosing to use it largely because it's free, so I think it's fair to use the term in this context.

No, communities are choosing it because they think it's free. That's exactly why perpetuating the myth is such a bad idea. Just because people think that it is, doesn't make it so.

It is free to them. It literally costs them no money. That's why they're choosing it. They're not fussed about the cost to their users.

(I don't use Facebook and don't like when communities build on Facebook.)

No.

To me the internet is supposed to be an open network to connect computers which means companies like Facebook can do what they want pretty much. I recently did some web presence for a charity and made a regular website, a Wordpress blog, a Facebook page and a subreddit. The Facebook thing got easily the most traffic but I was free to put up any amount of other stuff. I'm not sure trying to change Facebook would really be in the spirit of the open internet.

Why don't you just create an account for this sort of thing. No baby pictures, no sharing your holiday photos, no commenting on friends/families/colleagues posts. Just accessing groups/sites who use it because it's an extremely cost effective way of getting an internet presence. I used to be just like you but relented in the end because of Facebook messenger (yeah, could use email but people can't generally be bothered with that any more).

The problem is that they force you to use your real identity.

They would never know. They don't let you use it if you're under 13; there are probably tens of millions of children using it.

Until someone doesn't like one of your posts and reports your account as a fake. Then it gets locked and they make you scan your drivers license and send it in. I've seen this happen to people who do things as innocuous as put a nickname between their first and last name.

Sure, but then you create another fake account. In any event, my original suggestion was for people who simply wanted to silently join groups to read info, and/or avoid annoying login requests.

Which is not always a bad thing. It allows comments on community websites without getting most spam, trolls, sexist abuse and so on. Which is a large part of why things like community websites have moved there.

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