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Comment by benatkin | Hacker News Reader

They seem to avoid using their own brand a lot. They have a zillion domain names and they register a new one and don't use the logo except in the favicon and footer. I've seen similar stuff including divesting OSS projects like PyTorch and GraphQL which Google wouldn't. To me that's tacit admission that the Facebook and Meta names are tarnished. And they are, by the content they showed users in Myanmar with the algorithmic feed, and by Cambridge Analytica. Maybe the whole "Meta" name is no different from the rebranding of Philip Morris.

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Welcome to the wild world of corporate IT. Their VP has authority to make a new website if she wants, but has to go through a 3 month vetting process to put on a subdomain.

As someone who used to work on Facebook open source, that makes sense! After all, an insecure subdomain could lead to all sorts of problems on facebook.com. Phishing, stealing cookies, there's a lot of ways it could go wrong.

Whereas, if one engineer spins up some random static open source documentation website on AWS, it really can't go wrong in a way that causes trouble for the rest of the company.

My initial comment was sardonic but this is a good point.

My IT experiences elsewhere have left me a little jaded. :)

I wasn't aware of that, but it's intriguing! Eager to learn more about subdomains and vulnerabilities - any resources you'd recommend?

Read about the Same origin Policy and Content Security Policy. MDN is a canonical resource for this.

And you would learn that if you don't have wildcard cookies, which I generally wouldn't recommend, subdomains are isolated from each other. But with meta if the brand weren't tarnished, a new domain for subdomains like Google's withgoogle.com and web.dev would be a good place to add sites like this rather than subdomain.facebook.com

Meta isn't a typical corporation, though. Ordinary big company red tape could have stopped them from indirectly displacing thousands based on their religion. (That isn't an outlandish claim but is something they actually got sued for, though it was dismissed without absolving them of it)

It very much is a typical big corp, and OP is correct. It's easier to ship something on a new domain, using AWS and a bunch of contractors, than to add a subdomain to facebook.com or some other top-level domain

Not to mention, the "Ordinary big company red tape" didn't stop Coca Cola from hiring Colombian death squads, Nestle from draining the Great Lakes and selling it back to it's residents, nor Hershey's from making chocolate from cacao farmed with child slave labor.

Relative to the rest of FAANG (or even Fortune 500), Facebook might have the least blood on their hands when everything is said and done.

um... did you sleep through the last 8+ years of handwringing about election interference, Russian / state propaganda, live streaming massacres, addiction / mental health effects of social media, particular for kids? I can't imagine the other FAANGs come close

If platforming disinformation and enabling internet addiction is equivalent to criminal complacency, then Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and Google all have crimes to answer for. Facebook has shit the bed more times than they can count on two hands, but unfortunately that's kinda the table-stakes in big tech.

I actually have a much more positive impression of Meta because of this work. It's hard to describe, but they feel very competent. My instant reaction to something being by Meta Research is actually to think it's probably going to be interesting and good.

What are you talking about? There is a Meta Logo Favicon, "Meta AI" appears in the header and "Meta AI" is purposefully centered in the ABF text. Registering a new domain costs $10 compared to the massive pain of involving legal with the permissions to repurpose a new domain. It's a new project so why not make a clean start and just get a new website instead of going through the full FB/Meta approval process on branding.

They likely meant that Meta was established in part due to the Facebook name being tarnished in the first place.

I mentioned the logo. I didn't mention the text because perhaps they still want to score points for Meta, so hiding it entirely wouldn't make sense. But they avoid the larger immediate hangups of the big logo and the domain name.

On the one hand, sure. Facebook's brand is about as hip as a bag of Werther's Originals.

On the other hand, this is one of those things (like VR) that is a distinctly non-Facebook project. It makes no sense to position or market this as "Facebook" research. The Homepod isn't called the iPod Home for obvious reasons, so it stands to reason that Facebook execs realized selling someone a "Facebook Quest" sounds like a metaphor for ayahuasca. It's not entirely stupid to rebrand, especially considering how diverse (and undeniably advanced) they've become in fields like AI and VR.

I actively avoid everything that has anything to do with Facebook, and I can't be the only one.

Ever used React or PyTorch? Well, this is same. Developers make good stuff regardless of where they work, and good on FB for contributing

But yeah if you do open source adding an element of corporate branding is a sure way to kill the project. That's why it's not called "Apple Swift" or "Microsoft TypeScript".

Yeah, me too. I also avoid everything Apple and Google makes, but I'm not going to pretend like the Alphabet rebranding is their attempt at hiding who they are.

Alphabet wasn't a rebranding: the founding billionaires got bored of Google, and wanted to take out a few billion dollars per year out of it to create new toys without sharing it with Google.

Yes, many humans make irrational decisions like you

The page says at the very top, in a fixed header that is always visible (even as you scroll, or browse to other pages): "Research by Meta AI"

To me, this feels like they are not avoiding the "Meta" brand at all.

See my other comment. Of course they needed to have it somewhere to score points. These probably weren't people who were about to quit it, probably just with a lowered perception of it compared to a company people are mostly proud to work at like Google... https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=35458445

I was looking into GPU nearest neighbors libraries today and turned Faiss down because it said "Facebook". Completely irrational, I know.

You should use Faiss though, it's good.

Facebookresearch (the Github organization: https://github.com/facebookresearch/) is always great stuff.

I'm out of the loop, what happened in Myanmar?

From an Amnesty International report:

Beginning in August 2017, the Myanmar security forces undertook a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing against Rohingya Muslims. This report is based on an in-depth investigation into Meta (formerly Facebook)’s role in the serious human rights violations perpetrated against the Rohingya. Meta’s algorithms proactively amplified and promoted content which incited violence, hatred, and discrimination against the Rohingya – pouring fuel on the fire of long-standing discrimination and substantially increasing the risk of an outbreak of mass violence. The report concludes that Meta substantially contributed to adverse human rights impacts suffered by the Rohingya and has a responsibility to provide survivors with an effective remedy.

https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/ASA16/5933/2022/en/