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Comment by journalctl | Hacker News Reader

This is neat! I once found someone’s debit card on the street (in the US). It had a small face shot on it, so I found them on Facebook and sent them a message. Of course, Facebook had already started doing the “messages from non-friends are really hard to find lol” UI dark pattern, so like two years later the woman responds thanking me, but also saying she just canceled the card. Which is what I would’ve done, but I at least wanted to provide some peace of mind or closure that it wasn’t stolen or anything.

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A few years ago, I found a wallet at a New York subway station. The wallet had some documents (including driver's license), weed and a note saying "You are fool". I found the guy on Facebook. He didn't know anything about the note, but we figured it was written by someone who found the wallet before me. He or she took all the cash and left a note, lol. I threw out weed and mailed the owner all of his documents. He was the happiest man in the world on that day.

We had a woman visit a group I belong to from out of town, and I gave her and someone else a ride to a meeting. A couple hours later I found her debit card in my back seat.

I hate having to cancel cards. I'm still dealing with the echos of losing mine back in February[1] (right before moving!) and so I'm calling everyone in the group trying to get her contact info.

Turned out she hadn't even noticed it was gone yet.

[1] AT&T keeps silently cancelling my auto-pay on the new card and nobody can figure out why.

Nine hundred miles from home I spotted a driver's license in the snow from a chairlift on Snowmass Mountain. It was still there when I skiied back down. Imagine my surprise when it was for a neighbor who lived two blocks from me! It was only surpassed by my neighbor's surprise when I knocked on her door and handed her her son's driver's license.

I've found quite a few things over the years. Phones. Car keys. Cards. Wallets. I've run after people who left purses, bags, chargers, and even a guy who straight-up forgot his laptop on a table. The vast majority of the time, these things happen in some establishment with a lost-and-found I can turn items over to.

I have, though, found a half dozen credit/debit cards in the past two years outside of any good place to leave them (parking lots/garages, streets, sidewalks...). I guess I'm a good-samaritan with a healthy dose of paranoia/skepticism/cynicism. When there's no obvious place that I think the owner will know to look, I tell someone I know that I found it, and promptly cut the card up into fine pieces, mix them, split the pieces into a few groups, and dispose of them in a 4+ trashcans in different locations (this is probably excessive, but my goal is to dispose of the card with as much caution as I would get rid of my own card if I knew it could still be charged to.)

I have weighed trying to return them, but I ended up triangulating against the chances I'll: waste time tracking down someone who has already canceled the card anyways, send the card to the wrong person, completely creep someone out by tracking them down, or get caught with a card that has been reported stolen and have a hard time proving I didn't steal it.

Or worst case: A card that was stolen, used to empty the bank account and then dropped on the ground. You suddenly prime suspect.

You can do a picture search on Facebook?

They would have looked up the name and then found the matching profile pic to narrow it down.

Yup. It’s admittedly a bit unsettling, but people make their info public and I was trying to be helpful. Might as well try to use social media for some good, ya know?

Probably not natively/easily, but you can just do a reverse-image search on google, and it might lead you to a FB page.

"Dark pattern". Do you know how many unsolicited messages women receive on Facebook ?

This is a legitimate concern, but the way to combat isn't to silently hide messages behind unfamiliar UI. For a contrast, consider email junk filters, which generally serve a similar purpose but are accessible enough to easily scan through in case of legitimate messages being lost.

I've come across a type of scam where someone on a dating app like tinder will pose as an attractive person with the intention of trying to convince the victim to engage in sexually explicit texts or snapchats. Once they do, the scammer then looks up the friends of friends of the facebook profile associated with the number and then tries to blackmail the victim with threats of sending embarrassing texts to their closest friends. There are now TV commercials warning about it too. The best thing you can do is beg the scammer to post the texts, it really confuses the hell out of them and thanks to this facebook feature, the threat is greatly minimized.

Actually, the best thing you could do would be to not send someone pictures of yourself you wouldn't like shared. Also, the scammer could just add them as friends first.

Yes that would be the best thing but sometimes kids aren’t wise enough. Yes they could add all your friends, but the idea is to kill their incentive. After all they’re banking on you being ashamed for their blackmail to get money from you. Those that matter don't mind and those that do don’t matter.

They would still probably send nudes to your mother out of sadistic pleasure. Sometimes people get themselves into a situation where they have no good choices to make.

So what if they do? You can't let other people dictate your emotions or they will take advantage of you any way possible. That feeling of shame and embarrassment comes from within, not from the scammer, and therefore you have power over it, not them. There's no sadistic pleasure to be had if the victim doesn't care. If the victim doesn't care, why should the scammer waste their time? But just in case they do, good thing there's that facebook feature that hides messages from obscure users. By the time someone ever finds the message, you can just say it was a deepfake.

Just because it comes from within doesn't mean it's realistic to control it. People feel shame for complicated reasons, and to stop feeling shame about something would likely change parts of someone's personality. Maybe he or she thinks that only special people should see them nude? You can't just will that away. Plus, the perpetrator might be satisfied in knowing something like "now all her friends will know what a slut she is" or whatever those people tell themselves.

Not everyone is as "tough" as you. Learn to have empathy. Having your naked body sent to people you love is a grossly embarrassing proposition for most people.

Whatever, it's ridiculous I found years-old legitimate messages in there when I looked.

I once won one of those contests and didn't notice until half a year later. They were kind enough to send me an alternative prize.

If it's deceitful, I think it's fair to call it dark pattern, even if the deceit is done with good intentions.

Two tons and growing.

However, FB should have filters for those instead of grouping everyone in there.

It makes no sense that the person living in the same town as me with a genuine profile is in the same interface as accounts written in foreign languages with 1 friend and a creation date of two days ago.

I do, and most of them are gross (I’ve read a lot about what women deal with, and my women friends have told me as much). But I don’t know if the current solution is the best one. If I were a cynic I would say that Facebook does this intentionally because they want you to befriend someone to chat with them.

I doubt your comment has to be as gendered as it is.

> “messages from non-friends are really hard to find lol” UI dark pattern

You think you would do something different here? And you have considered all the possible ramifications of doing so? No doubt you've considered the impact on the number of spammy/scammy interactions that everyone experiences, the number of harassing messages that people around the world receive and you've made an informed trade-off between that and meaningful social interactions people have with the folks who find their wallet.

Seems like a pretty strong statement to call it a dark pattern, implying malice, when it could just be a good thing.

FB's solution to unsolicited messages and spam was basically to make messages from non-friends totally invisible. I wouldn't really call it a dark pattern, but they have broken the ability to send messages to anyone who is not your friend. It's pretty much a spam filter with with one binary parameter. It's just lazy.

Interesting point, I wonder if they can apply some logic into it, like if the sender is male and he's written to many female non-friends, give him a higher "probably junk" score. But if he's gotten good response rates his message is probably worth delivering.

FB probably already has data to know how much of a pervert someone is... if they linger on those beach pictures for too long, for example.

Wtf?

It _is_ a dark pattern. It prevents you from _knowing_ someone has messaged you. In 99,9% of cases you want to know someone sent you a message.

In 99.9% of cases you don't. It's mostly spam.

Facebook is a friend platform, not a stranger platform. Don't use it to message strangers, it's very explicitly not what the platform is designed for.

If email worked this way, the whole thing would collapse, because much of the time, you really do want to receive messages from new people. How would contacting a business work if their email system auto-rejected all messages from people not already known?

Sure, spam is a big problem, and that's why we've invented spam filters. Google was able to do that and it works well. Granted, Google is a huge company with lots of resources, but so is Facebook, so why can't they be bothered?

>Don't use it to message strangers, it's very explicitly not what the platform is designed for.

Wrong, it's designed to help people get in contact with each other. This doesn't mean everyone wants to be friends first before exchanging some messages.

This is what friend requests are for.

I don't want unsolicited messages from people. It's bad enough for me on LinkedIn, where that's the whole point.

When I still maintained a FB account, I had very few friends, basically family plus 2-3 others. I didn’t like the privacy problems.

Not everyone uses the tool the same way you do.

Tools don't exist in a vacuum. When a tool is a closed platform driven by a business, that business is going to heavy-handidly steer how the tool is used.

It isn’t always socially appropriate to friend request people, which is why I rarely do it (because I have no idea what the other person’s expectations are). If I’ve been introduced to a total stranger via Messenger, I don’t necessarily want to (nor should I have to) be their “friend” just to have them see my messages.

I guess I just have completely different use cases. Why would I want to read Facebook messages from complete strangers?

If I don't want them to be Facebook friends, then I'll give them my email.

> If email worked this way, the whole thing would collapse, because much of the time, you really do want to receive messages from new people.

Of course. But Facebook isn't e-mail. A closed system that thrives on heavily weighted social graphs is just nothing like an open standard for arbitrary message exchange.

> Wrong, it's designed to help people get in contact with each other.

Based on what? Have you used Facebook? Everything they do is about building and establishing communities, that's their business and they know it. They do almost nothing to help strangers communicate one-off. We are literally in the middle of a discussion about how Facebook gives low priority to messages from strangers, which is evidence that they have this mentality.

And that's why it will die or get nationalized like a water utility. A "friends" platform is inherently less scaleable than an "everyone" platform.

The whole world is on there. If I make my profile public I obviously intend to use it for people to find me.

Booting off the spammers seems like a much better idea to me.

This is literally the only thing I have used it for in the past 10 years. And it used to work well for that purpose.

If Facebook is not a stranger platform, then what are businesses doing there?

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