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Comment by joekrill | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised at the almost universal outrage over this. I assumed this was in response to the whole election interference campaign and related issues, i.e. preventing bots from blasting out content and predetermined times or in response to specific keywords in the news, things like that. So this seems like a step in the direction of ensuring actual humans are doing these things (or at least make it slightly more difficult for the bots). But maybe I'm wrong. I don't really use Facebook to begin with so I'm probably missing something here.

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I used to use this feature. It meant that I didn't have to log in to Facebook to re-post the thing I already posted on Twitter. If I still used this feature, I'd be upset that Facebook just took a step to make my life a little bit harder.

In general, I care more about my own convenience than some incremental step against bots that probably won't noticeably impact my experience on the site.

I agree - I see a lot of small business, even individuals from music/art circles what don't want to spend an inordinate amount of time keeping "followers" up to date...

If they can create and share once but have the computers syndicate that to the places that matter, they've found a happy balance.

The issue with the current model is that it's easily abused by bad actors (pun intended) to cram content down people's eye sockets.

I haven't used Facebook in a while, but can't you just not follow the accounts that spam bad content?

I'm in the same boat. It would apprear they realized that they are loosing advertizing eyeballs. Just checked, this also affects Buffer¹.

Well, if they are making a push to lock people into their platform, this might make me back off further.

¹https://faq.buffer.com/article/985-publish-facebook-profiles

I don't really get the hate, either - but then again, I was one of the people who was generally annoyed by friends filling their profiles and feeds with all kinds of auto-shared stuff from every other service... I like to imagine everybody would curate a little bit more on their own. Important stuff will still get shared, and if it isn't worth sharing if you have to do it manually instead of using an app or checkbox to "always share to Facebook", well, maybe it wasn't worth sharing to the world in the first place.

(I think in reality, my view of Facebook as a tool for messaging and looking at photos is probably fundamentally different than a lot of the upset people posting here who seemed to use Facebook for promoting their blogs or personal twitter brand or whatever)

You may have different followers on each platform. Your Instagram followers and your twitter followers and your Facebook friends are all slightly different groups. So to reach all of them, you need to post to all of these platforms.

It's more likely a move to try to keep people within the walled garden of facebook - people can't easily move to competitors (like blogs, other social media), if those competitors can't share to facebook too automatically to ease the transition.

It also means they can more easily charge companies for posting (who are the ones most likely to want to post to several services).

I'm surprised at the outrage too. Your personal profile on Facebook is supposed to be a place to post your holiday photos, pictures of your kids, updates about events in your life etc, not mindless automated stuff like this. Part of the reason Instagram has surged in popularity lately is because it's generally real humans posting the content rather than endless automated shitposts (I'm not saying they don't exist, but it's certainly more difficult to implement than it is on Facebook).

You'd think the posters in this thread have some kind of business interest in this functionality based on the way they're reacting.

> Your personal profile on Facebook is supposed to be a place to post your holiday photos, pictures of your kids, updates about events in your life etc, not mindless automated stuff like this.

Sure, but that doesn't mean you want it always entered on Facebook. When I post an Instagram photo, I'd like it to show up on Facebook as well (ironically, and totally as expected, this one will apparently still work). When I write a review on Goodreads, I'd like it to be reposted on Facebook automatically, without me having to copy-paste it. Etc.

This move is just further walling up Facebook's ecosystem.

Like automatic twitter updates containing personal thoughts being rebroadcasted. This will reduce the already thinning content on facebook further.

> Part of the reason Instagram has surged in popularity lately is because it's generally real humans posting the content rather than endless automated shitposts (I'm not saying they don't exist, but it's certainly more difficult to implement than it is on Facebook).

We are clearly not looking at the same subset of Instagram. I don't know anybody that actually uses it to post real content; it's just an endless feed of meme shitposting to laugh at.

Is this you? https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/07/the-i...

Hey that was a pretty cool read.

Interesting to see what the kids are up to.

I am far too old and uncool to have any idea that that kind of thing existed. I'm more in the barstool sports/onion/fuckjerry/animalsdoingthings wheelhouse. Pure stupid entertainment, hearkening back to a simpler internet. Pepperidge Farms remembers...

I'm not outraged, but I think it's a self-defeating move for Facebook. Which is fine, since Facebook - as a walled garden which is opposed to the Open Web - needs to go away anyway.

Edit:

I'm thinking more and more that I will probably be deleting my Facebook account sometime in the not too distant future. I'd really rather be doing all of my information sharing / browsing / interaction using a pure Open Web[1] oriented platform and that's exactly what Facebook is not.

Not sure exactly what form this will take, but I want to move to a platform which is not a walled garden, and is based on open and decentralized standards like RSS/Atom, ActivityStrea.ms, ActivityPub, RDF, FOAF, SIOC, XMPP, NNTP, SMTP, and the like.

A proper Web platform should allow anyone to participate on their own terms without some corporation being able to arbitrarily decide the terms of what you can do, while simultaneously profiting from the resale of our personal data.

Maybe this will mean Mastodon, maybe I'll go back to a self-hosted Roller based blog, etc. I already self-host an ejabberd server for XMPP messaging, so that will probably be part of what I do going forward.

[1]: http://tantek.com/2010/281/b1/what-is-the-open-web

It's annoying, I use Twitter as my main social network outlet, and post there regularly, and it was always convenient to have the posts mirrored on Facebook, since many friends don't use Twitter. Twitter is more of a work related thing, I guess, so perhaps I'll just end up segmenting my posting into work/personal between the two sites, but there's plenty of overlap and things I want to automatically go both places...

I feel like everyone uses different platforms to different ends, so I'm surprised at the number of people who feel the desire to crosspost.

To me, twitter is utterly cancerous and Facebook is where I see friends and family. To others, they use Twitter for communication with their business network, and Facebook for friends. And so on. The idea of blasting from one to the other, other than in the case of businesses (which I'm not much concerned about, they can suck it up) seems odd.

Obviously there's the occasional "tell twitter AND facebook that, after 10 years involved with this organization, I will be moving on.." but those rare cross posts can be done manually. It's the always-posting-multiple-places-as-part-of-a-personal-account that perplexes me.

And yet for some reason, plenty of people do mix and match. I have a bunch of Facebook friends who used the Twitter -> FB transport; part of their network is on Twitter, the other part is on Facebook, and they want to use a single entry point that's more convenient for them when posting.

The outrage isn't just about Twitter though. It's also about that you now can't do IFTTT->Facebook, Buffer->Facebook, or whatever other app you were using (including your own)->Facebook.

(Speaking of Buffer, did this move just kill their business?)

Buffer can still post to Facebook pages and groups. But it’s starting to feel more expensive for what it offers as the APIs and analytics available keep shrinking.

Perhaps, but anything that can no longer be done with a bot can (and will) be done by hordes of Chinese or Indian, etc., people working for pennies an hour.

Unless FaceBook is going to introduce CAPTCHAs for all submissions, bots will still be able to post just fine with a few tweaks.

CAPTCHAs are easily gamed too. Just throw whatever CAPTCHA you're trying to solve on a porn website and once someone fills it out simply have the bot copy over the response. This has been done for some time now.

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