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Comment by taneq | Hacker News Reader

It's not a natural place for him to post. He was bought. From what I've seen of the guy, the natural place for him to post would be in a .plan file somewhere.

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There's nothing wrong with posting a technical article on Facebook, especially if you're too busy being a graphical programming genius to set up your own blog somewhere. I don't see it as any different than posting on Medium...besides making a choice as to which company you're going to support? But seriously, who cares?

That I know of, Medium doesn't have as it's core business the mining and sale of user data with major intrusion and breach of privacy, much less a self-hosted, or even non-self-hosted blog.

> There's nothing wrong with posting a technical article on Facebook, especially if you're too busy being a graphical programming genius to set up your own blog somewhere

Well, he could have posted on the Oculus blog[1] - as the subject matter would have been very relevant.

> I don't see it as any different than posting on Medium

Medium doesn't try to coerce readers into singing up for an account. Nor does it track you across domains. Nor does it smash a lengthy article into 1/4 page width.

> But seriously, who cares?

A lot of folks, myself included. Not only was it difficult to read due to the formatting, but many have strong objections to Facebook in general, causing Carmack's thoughts have less reach.

Facebook is not a blogging platform, it never has been a blogging platform, and it never will be a blogging platform. It's simply not setup to be conducive of blog content. I wager this is the reason Facebook decided to not use Facebook for their own blog posts[2].

[1] https://www.oculus.com/blog/

[2] https://developers.facebook.com/blog

The only thing wrong with it is that you generally have to have a Facebook account to read Facebook content, which means you have to give them your real name. It appears that this month Facebook is allowing people to read this particular post, but they aggressively put the sign up wall wherever they thing it will generate the most conversions. You certainly can not see John Carmack's past posts without a Facebook account. Facebook is not the open web.

Technically you can violate the ToS and set up a fake account, but that's a bit of an inconvenience

Whether or not a post is available to "the public" (signed in or not) is completely the choice of the author, not some mysterious committee at Facebook.

Have you tried to read a page on facebook without an account? It's intended to be an almost unusable experience.

On loading a page, I get a modal popup obscuring all content insisting I "register" or "login", with a "not now" option. Then when you click "not now", the bottom third of the screen is obscured by a fixed overlay.

It is loosely describable as readable, but in practice, it's a fight to read it. The element has randomly generated id, so can't easily be blocked with ublock or similar.

indeed: inspect element -> style='display: none' should not be mandatory to read a page. Grease monkey is an option, but still.

It's coded in react or whatever so it just gets recreated a second or so later.

I agree Facebook is a bad place for placing public content. Note though that it's currently a lot more bearable if you disable JavaScript for Facebook. As someone who doesn't use Facebook at all it's easy for me to keep it disabled with NoScript. Then I just see content, no popups.

And what happens when facebook decides otherwise? Because it seems they already have with their strategy of curating content and information to maximise engagement.

Can you format text (eg different fonts for code snippets) in facebook posts?

>There's nothing wrong with posting a technical article on Facebook

Not what I think of when I think "technical article" http://i.imgur.com/nmoFIQL.png

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