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Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

I'm not even sure what rule this is supposed to break. I can't run an extension in my browser that automates button clicking on a website? So Facebook is cool with me manually unfollowing everyone and wasting five hours of my life but I can't do it automatically?

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Yes. Facebook wants disengagement to be high-friction. They want you to feel the pain of disconnecting because they don't want you to do it.

A few years ago I had decided that I was going to deactivate my Facebook account. In the process, there was a page that displayed the names and profile pictures of a few of my friends, and told me, explicitly, that each of them would miss me.

"John will miss you." "Mary will miss you." "Steve will miss you." "Greg will miss you." "Suzy will miss you."

It was so transparently evil that I couldn't believe it.

Jeez, that is the dirtiest dark pattern I have heard of so far. Sounds like GLaDOS begging you not to destroy her personality cores [1]

[1] https://youtu.be/4CdoufQu1ko

lol for some reason I picture this like one of the scenes out of a horror movie, all of your friends showing up wearing a nightgown with a blank stare going "don't go cory, we miss you, you can't leave us"

I don’t think he’d be in hot water if he simply developed a tool to hide the news feed.

Developing a tool to automate API interactions and sending some of the user data to a 3rd party server (he claims to verify it was working) is a big no-no on any platform.

Ehh, sending user data to a third party would be bad, but from my reading of the article it's not sending user data, just anonymous metrics:

> Participants agreed to share limited and anonymous information—specifically, the amount of time they spent on Facebook, the number of times they visited the site, and the number of friends, groups, and pages they were following and not following, both in total and broken down by category. (For regular Unfollow Everything users, the only Facebook-related data shared was the ratio of followed profiles to total profiles, a metric that helped me ensure the tool was working.)

I don’t think it matters. Writing a plug-in that scrapes content, however trivial or anonymized the author thinks it might be, is cause for concern for a company like Facebook.

Likewise, automating API requests is a problem for any platform.

I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect these platforms to sift through the source code and intentions of every automation tool that violates these policies and sort them into good and evil categories or decide which 3rd-party data collection is allowable.

> Likewise, automating API requests is a problem for any platform.

I agree, and it shouldn't be necessary. There should simply be a single 'unfollowAll' endpoint you can hit once for this operation.

And what grounds the company has for suing I ask you? What's next ad networks can sue us for using adblockers (or the people writing the ad blockers)? It's not that he was banned from Facebook, they demanded he remove his extension from the chrome app store and never write a Facebook extension again.

Automating API requests is what APIs were made for in the first place

>Writing a plug-in that scrapes content, however trivial or anonymized the author thinks it might be, is cause for concern for a company like Facebook

yes, I think it is this idea of Facebook's which is being criticized

a more nuanced approach would be better -- for example, if the issue is indeed a data violation, then the policy could be more nuanced to allow this sort of data collection, and that wouldn't require any additional code review of 3rd party apps

but of course, given the recent testimony of Facebook putting engagement before user safety, it seems obvious that the motivating factor was the disengagement the tool helped enable, not any sort of metrics the user agreed to send

indeed, TFA even links to this post which lays bare facebook's bogus "privacy" pretext for limiting interactions that promote social good:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/once-again-facebook-us...

Same as deleting leads in intercom, which is a 4/5 clicks process. So to get rid of spam accounts, you always have to go through a tedious process.

Why? Because after all you're being billed per lead.

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