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Comment by badfrog | Hacker News Reader

> Facebook would be a pointless exercise, since the <div> names are automatically generated.

Also:

> all ads are supposed to contain the word “sponsored” as part of a mandatory disclosure, so users can distinguish between ads and their friends’ posts. Our tool recognized ads by searching for that word. Last year, Facebook added invisible letters to the HTML code of the site. So, to a computer, the word registered as “SpSonSsoSredS.” Later, it also added an invisible “Sponsored” disclosure to posts from your friends.

https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-blocks-ad-transp...

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On top of that, Facebook and I have a different view on what constitutes as an ad.

A Facebook page that I'm following paying money to reach me is an ad according to Facebook. To me, that's extortion.

On the other side, we have notifications about friend suggestions. You can't turn them off in the notification settings. That to me is an "ad" for Facebook itself, even if nobody payed them money. It's an undesired content that pulls my attention away from what I came there to do in order to promote a product.

> A Facebook page that I'm following paying money to reach me is an ad according to Facebook. To me, that's extortion.

How would you fix that? The only thing I can think of would be a chronological feed where everybody sees every post.

That would indeed be best and has been the number one complaint about Facebook UX since time immemorial. It would also end one of the most annoying issues on FB's timeline - "I just saw an interesting post, but the timeline randomly refreshed itself and now it's gone".

The model they currently use serves two goals: to extort money from fanpages, and to hook users up by intermittent reinforcement.

Oh yes, very occasionally it's been an ad, or at least mass media output - even when I recall who posted it it's hard to find.

They probably already record every item displayed on screen (and how long for, and whether my cursor hovered it, etc.) so a list of items I saw (on any device) in the chronological order I saw them should just be a simple db lookup away.

Do they need to solve it or do they need to provide me with the tools to help me filter them out?

If you build a cockpit by measuring everyone's dimensions and averaging them, you'll end up with a cockpit that fits nobody[0]. I believe the same is true for feeds as well.

There's an amount of information that works for the average Facebook user. However, none of us are precisely on that average. By building algorithms whose mission is max consumption by the average user, they've made their product useless to everyone.

[0] https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-...

Delete Facebook.

Honestly, everything this company does is shady beyond all shame.

Twitter keeps fucking around with their timeline feed, but they've preserved a "chronological, show me everything" option through all of their other bad ideas.

Do you hide tweets liked by the people you follow? Shadow notifications? "In case you've missed it" sections?

After a few refreshes of my Twitter homepage in a short time span, I did a little research: I've edited the CSS to make the distinction of "liked" tweets more obvious. Over 50% of "fresh" content turned out to be likes by the people I follow that are in no way chronological.

You can fight it... for now, but I assume not for long. I've stopped relying on Twitter for that same reason I've stopped relying on Facebook.

> Shadow notifications?

Is that the name for the "recent tweet from X" notifications? Those have made Twitter notifications completely useless for me. :(

That's how I refer to all the notifications that I didn't expect and don't need.

As far as I know, there's no universal term for them. Since we already associate darkness with bad UX patterns, "shadow notifications" as a subset of "dark patterns" has a nice ring to it.

This sounds to me like an argument for browsers to stop honoring markup that makes text invisible. Are there legitimate use cases for interspersing invisible zero-width characters in the middle of a word? I don't know what the markup that Facebook uses actually looks like, so I'm not sure how closely it resembles legitimate design patterns.

We've long had the ability to set a minimum font size, but I suspect browser vendors have viewed that purely as an accessibility feature.

(Tangent: I've also been increasingly disappointed that browsers let sites make text unselectable. I understand that there was originally a use case, but I only ever encounter it as an anti-feature these days.)

Yes, there are many such use cases, and it would be impossible to predict what they are (what are you going to do, live word segmentation in the browser with any reliability across all languages in the world?). At the LDC, we do character-based annotation on words, which, since it includes highlighting individual characters, means each character has its own span (this is actually something I've seen done for wildly unrelated reasons on other sites, with spans, divs, etc). I'm sure there are millions of sites doing things like hiding/showing text that's next to other text for a million different reasons.

Can you elaborate on what "the LDC" is, and how broken your site would look if every piece of text you have styled to be invisible were instead shown by the browser?

Breaking up a word into multiple tags is very different from inserting invisible extraneous content into the middle of a word. The latter is what I'm questioning the usefulness of; the former I can see as occasionally useful, but should be avoided when it breaks screen readers and search engines.

Hey, sorry I missed this. LDC is the Linguistic Data Consortium (https://www.ldc.upenn.edu/). Our web annotation tool (internal app) would probably be broken in many places.

Take a modal for example - the text is not visible until the modal is opened. Let's think about menus that display on hover - they wouldn't work. What about tooltips or other sorts of floating label type things? What about other text that only appears on hover, or when some action is performed?

Sure, you could wait to insert these things into the page until the last second, but it would be less performant and complexity would be higher.

If you saw what the web looked like without display: none and visibility: hidden, I think you'd change your mind. There are infinite applications.

>This sounds to me like an argument for browsers to stop honoring markup that makes text invisible

Aside, this reminds me of the brief period of time where "hacking" SEO by pasting huge volumes of keywords in text the same color as the background and/or hidden by other page elements was a relatively common trick. Search engines simply switched to more sophisticated methods of page ranking, I wonder what change could be made remedying this which would be similarly non-disruptive outside the bad actors.

So, I can understand those who argue for ad-supported websites, and against ad-blockers.

But can anyone honestly claim that putting an invisible 'sponsored' on non-sponsored posts is ethically OK? Can't we all agree that ads should be readily identifiable as such?

> Can't we all agree that ads should be readily identifiable as such?

By human users for sure. Scripts are a whole other question.

Are they though? Why would they be? Or taking it another way, what moral reasoning justifies making it purposefully difficult for scripts (read: user agents) to identify ads?

BTW. to the extent clearly marking ads/sponsored content is required by law, I wonder whether Facebook could be sued for making this difficult for users with disabilities - after all, accessibility tools like screen readers are scripts and rely on machine-readable metadata.

> Scripts are a whole other question.

I disagree entirely.

You mean identifiable to bots? Since they're already visually identifiable to humans, who don't see the invisible 'sponsored'.

This seems like a solvable problem. Ignore elements that have display: none, visibility: hidden, or opacity: 0. Do fuzzy text matching if you must. If you know that they'll never put just "Sponsored" on the real ads, ignore anytime you find that string.

So here's a different idea. I wish EU would legislate that all 3rd party ads in electronic media need a machine-readable tag constructed in a way that is trivially readable (e.g. <div class='ad'> instead of requiring training a ML model on rendered page to recognize; metadata or a red pixel in the corner on video streams, etc.), and denotes the exact area taken by the ad, or otherwise facilitate its removal. Coupled with GDPR, this would end ad-tracking bullshit by fiat (at least for Europe).

(By 3rd party ads I mean all ads that are advertising anything not directly sold or provided by the owner of the service showing that ad. That's to resolve the immediate objection of whether telling people about new features is an ad or not.)

Man can dream.

EDIT: But this man would also vote for the person pushing for such legislation.

Isn't it just weird that we can't vote for that issue without getting every other issue the person also wants, like why must issues be lumped in to person-bundles. It's just broken.

Personally I'm stuck with voting for "the party not dismantling the NHS who stand a chance of getting in".

Maybe in my kids lifetime we'll get proper PR at the national level (UK).

It's what I find appealing about the concept of "fluid democracy" - the ability to vote on particular issue in isolation. Taking it to the extreme is probably a bad idea, but so is our current way.

As is commonly quoted, putting every issue to public vote would lead to bringing back the death penalty.

...also brexit ;-)

Brexit has really damaged my faith in democracy.

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