Mirror Links for "Unfollow Everything" | Hacker News Reader

Mirror Links for "Unfollow Everything"

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258 pointsNabiDev46 comments

Louis Barclay the extension author felt that unfollowing everything improved his Facebook experience and helped him break his Facebook addiction. Louis wrote this extension so other people could try this and enlisted a Swiss University to conduct a study to see if this improved user satisfaction with Facebook.

Facebook not only took down the extension but banned the personal Facebook account of Louis Barclay and ordered that he never make any tool that interacts with Facebook, which he felt was heavy handed but as a UK resident felt unable to seek legal redress as in the UK if one loses one is liable for the opponents court costs.

Here is the Slate article by Louis Barclay.

https://slate.com/technology/2021/10/facebook-unfollow-every...

and an opinion by Cory Doctorow on the utility of Unfollow Everything, the study and heavy handedness as a tendency of Facebooks to squash research it doesn't like.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/08/unfollow-everything/

> Louis Barclay the extension author felt that unfollowing everything improved his Facebook experience and helped him break his Facebook addiction.

Addiction broken.

> helped him break his Facebook addiction

Nice! It's awesome that he said this. I always comment on the addictive nature of these platforms and games. Really nice to see these concepts making their way to a wider audience.

Facebook wants their platform to be addictive. That's what engagement means: the rat pressed all the right buttons when provided with the proper stimuli. They want people looking at and interacting with the feeds as long as possible so they can serve as many ads as possible.

They need to be held accountable for deliberately causing damage to people's mental health.

For some reason an image of Barbra Streisand just popped up in my head.

Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

First paragraph:

>The Streisand effect is a phenomenon that occurs when an attempt to hide, remove, or censor information has the unintended consequence of increasing awareness of that information, often via the Internet. It is named after American entertainer Barbra Streisand, whose attempt to suppress the California Coastal Records Project photograph of her residence in Malibu, California, taken to document California coastal erosion, inadvertently drew greater attention to it in 2003.

This is yet again the same thing as when youtube-dl was being "mirrored" not long ago. What is the point of mirroring this extension?

Facebook only needs to change ONE SINGLE LETTER in their website and it will immediately make all the "mirrors" of this extension useless.

It is a form of public protest and backslash.

I did some cursory research yesterday when I first learned about the events here...

There are years-old, regularly updated gists/threads on GitHub with people doing this simply with the browser console

Can't this be implemented as browser automation? Why FB can block it?

it can be implemented by FB is just saying they block extension for security and privacy thing. They are just being dictator and they can flow any amount of money to ban such extension or use legal powers.

And if you read the story you will know why author of extension was helpless.

https://slate.com/technology/2021/10/facebook-unfollow-every...

Honestly, just delete your Facebook. It’s a better solution and it has the benefit of being officially supported.

Depends on what you want. If you still want to use FB messenger, sign in with Facebook, view your family pics etc and just don’t want the newsfeed, unfollow everything is what you want.

This is a lot more difficult than you make it sound without browser extensions to help. Facebook saw to it.

I’d like to understand your point of view. From the second sentence of your comment, it seems like you’re being sincere and not trying to be hyperbolic. Surely you’re intelligent enough to understand why it would be difficult for some people to _just_ delete their Facebook account and why that would be a point of contention. If you understand this, what exactly compels you to type out your comment and post it? However, if you don’t, then my apologies! And yes, I am fully aware of how this reply comes off.

I deleted my FB probably 10 years ago and never looked back, but most people I know who still have it act like it's some vital part of life which can't be left behind. It's integrated into how people interact with the other people in their life so much they can't get rid of it.

It's not so much an addiction as a lifestyle. Telling most people to quit their FB is like telling folks in the US to sell their car and never use a personal vehicle again... they're whole life is structured around that fundamental fact, they can't just leave it behind.

Sadly there’s one thing I do need it for, and that’s the Oculus Quest.

There are lots of weird edge cases where your theoretically-dead Facebook account gets resurrected..

When I deleted mine the second go around I manually deleted and unfollowed everything just in case it comes back. Wish I had known about this extension.

Quoting a fellow HNer:

I recommend avoiding all browser extensions unless they come from well-known developers (eg 1Password) and they’re downloaded and installed through official channels. Browser extensions have a lot of access to your browsing activity and can phone home as well. One of the reasons this extension was sent a C&D was that it was sending some data home to the author’s server. That might be what the install instructions above are hinting at with the warning to examine the JS and remove any phone-home code. The original author defended the data collection as just enough to make sure the plug-in was working, except for study participants who apparently submitted much more information through the plug-in. Either way, I wouldn’t rush to install a plug-in that was caught sending any of my social media data to a 3rd-party server. I certainly would not install a browser extension from an unknown 3rd-party website just to spite Facebook, regardless the claimed origin of the code.

Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28804308

Thanks for the link as the thread is rather hilarious with the Dropbox v2 comment.

> One of the reasons this extension was sent a C&D was that it was sending some data home to the author’s server

I think that this is incorrect.

The C&D included that as an example of banned things - beneath the actual list of what the extension had done wrong.

Per the wording, what they had done wrong was automation of actions, and unlicensed use of trademarks.

The letter: https://louisbarclay.notion.site/Unfollow-Everything-cease-a...

“Accessing and/or collecting users content or information” is the first bullet point in the C&D. The Reddit install instructions even include a note to remove the phone-home code before running the plug-in.

The plug-in author also explained his data collection in his interviews. He said they collected a lot of data for study participants and less data for normal users to confirm the plug-in was “working”.

The first paragraph is the only one that includes a list of what their extension had been doing wrong. I haven't seen it typed up anywhere else, so here are the salient bits:

> Facebook has gathered evidence that your Chrome extension “Unfollow Everything for Facebook” facilitates unauthorized functionality on Facebook. Specifically, your extension automates actions on Facebook, including mass following and unfollowing of Friends, Pages, and Groups. Your extension also impermissibly makes use of Facebook’s trademarks. These activities violate Facebook’s terms.

> Facebook demands that you stop these activities immediately.

The bullet point you've pointed out lives beneath that list of issues, under a title of, "Facebook's terms prohibit, among other things." Things that Facebook's terms prohibit ≠ stuff the extension was doing.

Otherwise it would be curious indeed that Facebook isn't demanding they cease the collection of data :)

> The plug-in author also explained his data collection in his interviews

That could well be – I'm just saying that the C&D does not include it as a basis.

Is the author of the extension bound by the FB EULA? I'd guess no.

For this kind of simple use case, a userscript makes more sense than a full extension, which has the benefits of making the code easily auditable and forkable.

Harder for less technical people to use however.

It's just one more step, one time. After installing a userscript extension, it's as easy as a normal add-on.

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