I'm sure that it wasn't intentional. Most CMSs have this functionality built in.
Facebook has its claws in deep. De-Facebooking the Web isn't going to be a simple task.
Do you think anyone will try? This is a PR storm, but it will be drowned out in a few weeks or less with whatever headlines get clicks for news sites at that point. Click-hungry web publishers are not going to remove these sharing tools, and many smaller sites depending on tools like Wordpress probably don't even know how even if they wanted to.
If Facebook lost half of its users tomorrow (which won't happen), there would still be over a billion people using it, not to mention its other tools like Instagram. Love them or hate them, Facebook isn't going anywhere for the foreseeable future.
Which is a big problem for German (and potentially European) publishers due to privacy laws. One major German IT publisher therefore developed an open source privacy preserving tool that strikes a balance: https://github.com/heiseonline/shariff
It shows a bunch of buttons but only loads the 3rdparty Javascript when you press them once (ie. show intent to use them) and asks you to press once again (then the native 3rdparty button).
You can also apply Richard Gott's estimator:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/10/06/we-ha...
At the 50% confidence interval, it predicts that Facebook has between 5 and 42 years left in it. Maybe the Cambridge Analytica scandal is serious enough to be the death knell, and in five years it will be defunct. Five years is a long time on the web. I could easily see us looking back on this as the scandal that led to Facebook's complete downfall.
Another question I don't have the answer to is how dependent is Facebook on advertising. If their brand becomes toxic and all the advertisers pull out, how much runway do they have? Enough to build a completely new revenue model before going out of business?
Day to day big things are rare, but over longer time intervals large companies do die, and for more frivolous reasons than this.
There are plenty of companies that will still advertise there. As long as the users remain - and that appears to not be a question, at least right now - there will be advertisers chasing after them. I am in charge of a relatively large Facebook advertising budget, and I can tell you that I would love it if, for example, half of the advertisers left. Facebook ad pricing is largely based on an auction model, and that would mean less competition and lower priced clicks. But I'd be stunned if even 0.5% of the advertisers left over this.
Mozilla is in a unique situation, in that the political views of its workforce seem to dictate many of its business decisions. That is not the case at most companies.
"When building sand castles on the beach, we can ignore the waves but should watch the tide." -- Dijkstra
What will Facebook's successor look like, and what makes you think it'll be any more human-friendly?
Honestly, I think it's going to be "mobile messaging and X" where X is different for every subset of people. The mobile messaging allows you to keep contact details for people and keep in touch in a non-1-to-1 way through group chats, while the choice of X allows people to make a statement about what sort of person they are.
https://techcrunch.com/2014/01/23/facebook-losing-users-prin...!
Though to the best of my understanding there is no way of commenting on RSS posts unless you host a site.
Seems like a good time to resurrect that idea.
I respect what they are doing, but the community is still nerdy and really small. It will feel good from a techie perspective, but it's not something that many users are going to get much value out of, you are kind of wasting their time.
Not sure, but pretty sure Mastodon is going to end up being as popular as Diaspora RStatus or app.net. It's not a mainstream solution. Federation for most people is a useful feature on top of an active popular social network, not the other way around.
> "They know everything we click and like on their site, and know who our closest friends and relationships are."
was actually a big understatement - due to the ubiquity of the share button, which (as many HN readers know, but many average internet users do not) tracks logged in (edit: and also logged out) users, they also know a decent approximation of everything, done by everyone across the entire internet.
Now, it may be ironic, but it might also be poetic justice if something being shared over Facebook ultimately weakened it. Imagine a virally-shared post encouraging people to take a deletion pledge in 5 days by sharing it. They could use the intervening 5 days to get contact information, and establish what kind of relationship they'd like to have with the people they actually care about on there.
It also tracks logged out users. Assuming you didn't log out of Facebook AND clear your cookies. Logging out of Facebook merely marks you as logged out. But the cookie remains and they use it to track all the sites you visit.
They actually said they're not going to "support the platform with our advertising dollars."
It's not really hypocritical at all...
Should probably be https:// though!
You can see an implementation of it on Schneier blog: https://www.schneier.com/
And before anyone says,
Yes, you can use developer version but that's a beta (yes, it is). Using a beta as your daily driver shouldn't be a thing.
Yes, you can use the unbranded not-Firefox version. But now you have to install it manually (not in any distro's repository) and keep it up to date manually.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/stallman-kth.html
>When I found out about those, I overthrew them. The first time, I happened to know the password of one of the people who was included among the elite, so I was able to use that to turn everyone back on. The second time he had changed his password, he had now changed his sympathies, he was now part of the aristocratic party. So, I had to bring the machine down and use non-timeshared DDT to poke around. I poked around in the monitor for a while, and eventually figured out how to get it to load itself in and let me patch it, so that I could turn off password checking and then I turned back on a whole bunch of people's wheel bits and posted a system message. I have to explain that the name of this machine was OZ, so I posted a system message saying: “There was another attempt to seize power. So far the aristocratic forces have been defeated—Radio Free OZ”. Later I discovered that “Radio Free OZ” is one of the things used by Firesign Theater. I didn't know that at the time.
>But gradually things got worse and worse, it's just the nature of the way the system had been constructed forced people to demand more and more security. Until eventually I was forced to stop using the machine, because I refused to have a password that was secret. Ever since passwords first appeared at the MIT-AI lab I had come to the conclusion that to stand up for my belief, to follow my belief that there should be no passwords, I should always make sure to have a password that is as obvious as possible and I should tell everyone what it is. Because I don't believe that it's really desirable to have security on a computer, I shouldn't be willing to help uphold the security regime. On the systems that permit it I use the “empty password”, and on systems where that isn't allowed, or where that means you can't log in at all from other places, things like that, I use my login name as my password. It's about as obvious as you can get. And when people point out that this way people might be able to log in as me, i say “yes that's the idea, somebody might have a need to get some data from this machine. I want to make sure that they aren't screwed by security”.
So it both provides a false sense of security and prevents users from being able to control the software they run on their own machines.
Facebook has its claws in deep. De-Facebooking the Web isn't going to be a simple task.
Bit of hypocrisy to say 'we're not advertising on Facebook anymore' while leaving those buttons in place. Would be ironic if people shared this article on Facebook.