Meta cuts off third-party access to Facebook Groups | Hacker News Reader

Meta cuts off third-party access to Facebook Groups

techcrunch.com

110 pointsleotravis1032 comments

Seems like, they didn’t want LLMs training on their data, unless it’s their LLMs… but also they want people interacting with the site to make posts, not posting via API as ads get no eyeballs when you post via API… also it’s only a matter of time before people just write scripts that generate LLMs output into a post on Facebook via API. I’m sure that’s already happening. Soon enough Facebook just becomes robots talking to robots..

Which cyberpunk novel is that? Something about strata upon strata of computing talking trash.

Neal Stephenson's Anathem, I believe.

> Soon enough Facebook just becomes robots talking to robots..

Hasn't it been that for a while already?

“ Soon enough Facebook just becomes robots talking to robots..”

I’m looking forward to this.

The Dead Internet Theory is becoming truer by the day it seems.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory

For some reason, that made me laugh.

Upvoted. 100%

"...the shutdown of the API would cause problems for companies that offer solutions to customers who want to schedule and automate their social media posts."

Turning off automated posting ought to be an improvement.

Sounds like gatekeeping such that AI crawlers can’t access.

My initial thought was generated content, but this is probably more accurate.

Except from their own subsidiaries?

edit: I was missing some context.

- https://www.reuters.com/technology/metas-new-ai-chatbot-trai...

>The entrepreneur pointed out this is not the first time Meta has done something like this.

>“A number of years ago [Meta] abruptly ended their Events API, with zero notice,” Burge says. “We just came in one day and everything was broken, we had thousands of support requests open from our customers and it almost destroyed our business that time as well.”

I sure hope their business has diversified a bit, because if Meta did it before they'll do it again.

Back when Facebook games were really popular (Farmville and Bejeweled Blitz come to mind), Facebook was infamous for making breaking changes constantly. I remember this specifically because my friend told me that I should move one of my games over to Facebook, and I told him that if I did that, keeping it working would be a full-time job.

Classic "Move fast and break stuff" lol

At this point a walled garden is more of heavily fortified border wall with razor wire, guns and armed troops.

Maybe we shouldn't be able to automate social media, but the problem is that this just means you need to hire people to do the automation manually...

Which spammers and scammers may still do. All this does is make it harder for regular people to interact with facebook on their own terms.

Before shutdown of Events API Facebook was a convenient hub for social events and parties. Shutting it down led to organizers no longer posting events to FB (I guess they were using some 3rd party platforms that cross-post to multiple sites) and just removed one of the few remaining reasons to use FB.

This I imagine will have similar effect with some groups moving elsewhere (Instagram, Twitter?), just further shrinking userbase.

Is this a thing? How often did people previously “automate” their own interaction with a Facebook property?

I imagine <<1% of people moderate a Facebook group, and they may value automation. But that’s it?

Some companies whole business model is just that. See buffer.com. That being said, a lot of the stuff they do is now offered by Meta directly (e.g: scheduling post, responding to comments at scale)

It's probably exceptionally tiny, I managed FB's web proxy for chat, and I was upgrading the protocol and discovered two people who wrote their own clients. I had to cut them off just they were not polluting the data I was gathering for reliability.

I still chuckle when companies like Facebook change their name to something else. They're kidding themselves.

This sounds about as bad and earth-shaking as MySpace shutting down.

My guess is that it has to do with the election. Any automated use of Facebook is going to invite unwanted scrutiny, and so Facebook is probably locking down a bunch of third-party automation.

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