By banning spammers and scammers. Facebook opts not to ban scammers, as it's a significant portion of their revenue, and the latest AI slop is very good for engagement.
Nothing much left to innovate.
The few groups I'm in, local wildlife and pet bird groups, mainly consist of people asking questions that need to and are usually answered by posting links to local resources or regulations.
These people have arguably contributed nothing to society for over a decade (and maybe even made it worse in some instances) for very fat salaries, and yet they’re being praised for being the example of best engineers.
I periodically use their websites and they’re horrible!
Seriously, we should know better as the dev-tech society.
And I don’t give a darn about their research that is being built on top of barely legal mass surveillance so don’t tell me their contributions from stealing data were helpful.
How does this work fits with their mission of destroying the fabric of society and the mental well-being of teenagers, I cannot explain.
Naturally, they do it to earn "some respect" from those who otherwise see them clearly.
Meta earned a ton of goodwill by doing this -- it was very brave, and very influential. In my eyes, it outweighs everything negative they've ever done.
Those hyperlinks ain't free, you know.
Embrace, extend, extinguish
Good deals and things can still certainly be found on Craigslist, and there seems to have been a rebound lately in use, but for a while there all that was left on Craigslist was old timers and resellers.
I've been researching local newspapers, and the problems they face, lately, and one of them is that none of the social media sites allow them to get any visits from their followers because they either significantly de-rank posts with links off-site or it costs money to reach followers with links, or both. Of course Google scraping their sites and summarizing is another symptom of the same problem; FAANG wants all the revenue and a monopoly on what you see. Every penny every eyeball. None for small businesses, none for independent media, none for individuals.
You get both the safety of a public place to meet and identity verification through your post office representative
Seems like a win for everyone and we get FB out of the way
I know it's all speculation, and this does come across as more monetization creep, but I can't help to wonder if there's an underlying reason beyond "line go up".
So it's not necessarily clickbait -- seems to be also an evolved workaround to fight throttling. :-/
in fact... maybe kids think of instagram as a boomer unc platform now too.
Generating slop content is cheap now, but you need to store it and very few people will see it, so you can't show more ads.
Not defending it, just explaining the logic and why it might work even if it seems superficially stupid.
The 2020s are a war on hyperlinks. It is particularly unfortunate to see this masquerading as a concern for safety and security (“everything outside of our platform is scary and insecure”)
I get that Facebook is trying to make some $$$ on them here, but I wasn't aware we had any war (not even a "war on Christmas" fake war) going on against links.
* Facebook with this and its new scraping rules for business accounts
* Turning Venezuela into a fiefdom
* Skydance merger
and on and on. But it's not late stage. It's just capitalism and we'll be reading about the same behavior 10 years from now.
Are you being sarcastic? Please let it be that you’re being sarcastic.
You can't study them, you can't modify them, you can't improve them, you can't look into how they are built etc.
Their mission is to make Zuckerberg rich and powerful. That’s the sole purpose of Meta, everything else is incidental. It just so happens that they also destroy the fabric of society and the mental well-being of teenagers but it’s not their primary goal, they just don’t care about the side effect. It would be all the same if they were poisoning coral reefs and giving wedgies to grandmothers instead. As long as the process benefits Zuckerberg in the end, nothing else matters to the company.
This is the funniest thing I’ve read on here.
React? We can all criticize it, but it has revolutionized the web. Llama. Did you forget what sparked the whole open-weight wave? It was that. I dislike Meta, but I would not criticize the engineers competence. They have done impressive things, check out their blog if you genuinely are curious.
Personally I hate what react has done to the web.
Now to load a simple website that in the past was a few kB of HTML, CSS and JS you need to download Mb of JS code. Now the browser needs to use Mb of RAM just to display a stupid webpage.
For what? It was better when we had PHP pages that did produce HTML on the server side.
Another thing to me that we have to get Meta discredit for, not something good in any way.
"Things seem to hang on in computing just because they work a little bit." -Alan Kay
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8841428
Rich Harris: Rethinking Reactivity:
https://svelte.dev/blog/svelte-3-rethinking-reactivity
>There are some important technical differences (as I explain in the video above, React is not reactive) but conceptually it’s the same thing.
Pretty much in the same way that a significant number of people in tech who wants a good paying job looks up to people working for Zuckerberg.
Like, even in its heyday, it was such an attention trap, and it had very negative effects on the people who got addicted (especially teens).
But the site has gotten so much worse in the past couple years, and its brand is in the garbage. Maybe that's all for the best -- it was never really worth preserving.
There needs to be an easy to use low-cost, possible also advertisement driven, alternative that business can latch to so more can leave facebook.
I actively refuse to support Meta and block all their domain names in case of clicking on a tiny URL that sends me to their site. It also helps block their analytics used by 3rd parties. I will forever be a sunk cost for them.
You’re arguably a war criminal either way, might as well get top dollar.
Only because the longer you work there, probably the more you've been able to handle while you time there, but I don't really care if you worked at Meta or at Momandpop Software Corp down the road, I care about your personality and ability to learn and adapt, these are stronger signals of the types of devs I want to work with than anything else. I'd still consider you, but I might pass on you if I feel more confident about someone else.
By whom? I haven't seen anyone say something positive about Meta or their employees for at least 15 years, unless you count people who were being paid to write PR articles.
That two libraries already build Frontend and AI.
And yes, I mean facebook.com
I don’t think that’s a maybe. There’s actual research on social media addiction. For me, getting off Facebook improved my life.
So now it's "pay $50 to post 2 links" but does that guarantee them showing it to your followers and friends? If NOT -- is that sufficient reason for a fraud lawsuit?
React, React Native, GraphQL, LLama, PyTorch, RocksDB, Cassandra, folly, Hack, HHVM, OCP, Presto, btrfs, cgroupsv2/PSI, eBPF, roughly 12% of all Linux kernel contributions are signed off by Meta + Meta is the 5th biggest contributor to Linux kernel.
Perhaps research a bit more before you make these ignorant comments.
I don't know anything about the other things so I can't say if they are good or not. But acting as if react is some big invention is crazy. bell Labs gave us Unix and C. Meta isn't even close to inventing something like that.
From the messed up self-image issues they instill on children to the hand they played - either intentionally or through pure ignorance - in ethnic cleansing, I couldn't care less about what they've done in the tech space when those commits are signed in blood.
How come they haven't contributed anything to society, so many developer jobs based on pushing that stuff all over the place. /s
Now tell me where else can I find such a company having that?
I only care about competitive programming and solve algorithm problem. Nothing else matter: I don't care about product, frontend, security, data pipeline, bla bla nonsense.
And by the way, $400k+ salary in cash and RSU please. No stock options, thank you.
Not as FB. But they have shipped a lot of useful stuff. That doesn't mean the company is suddenly great and all should be forgiven but there is some nuance here.
> I seriously can’t understand why there’s so much respect for anyone that works at Meta.
Is there? Thats new for me.
> yet they’re being praised for being the example of best engineers
Are they? I associate meta with the “move fast and break things” philosophy, not engineering excelence.
I’m sure there are some fine engineers there. But by and large it is just a big company with questionable ethics and lots of money.
But from a technical perspective, Google breaks constantly. Here's one. On Pixel you could use Assistant to start a timer or open an application. For years. Then Gemini is forced (first opt in, then forced, as is the Google Way)- there's no way to turn off voice out loud response, and opening apps - the most basic thing - doesn't work.
Then you have long-standing headaches like Gmail interface, reports of people's businesses getting blocked on Google Workspace, etc.
Facebook is blamed for that data broker scandal and making us hate our families due to political arguments. Google does all the same data broker stuff, and other than not being a forever scroll social media site, it's morally and technically repugnant.
It ain't the same as the Bell Labs days. They try to larp as if they are the computer scientists of old but none of them are. They are just there for the salary and prestige and that's it.
ChrisArchitect•1h ago