Another FB engineer here - I actually work on the system that caused this false positive. You're right that if we were actually trying to stop constructive discussion from happening, that would be bad. We're definitely not trying to do that - in fact, our goal is the exact opposite.

Similarly, if we let through blatantly malicious or spammy comments, I think that would be bad as well.

While I wish I could say we were perfect at stopping spam, the reality is that no spam classification system is perfect. Sometimes we err too far on the conservative side, and spam gets through. Sometimes we err too far on the aggressive side, and good content is incorrectly blocked. That's what happened here - it turned out one of our spam classifiers was a little too aggressive, and we've turned it off.

A laudable goal, but for what definition of "constructive"? And PLEASE don't tell me that you guys think it will be the same definition for every site.

It sounds like you've gotten it completely wrong. He didn't mean people can't use ASCII art of write 'lol'. If you have an account and have a lot of subscribers you will notice many comments (obviously spam) which write lol, hello, hi etc and are not contributing anything to the conversation. These are people that just want to expose their account in as many places as possible (spammers).

Facebook aren't trying to stop people using phrases like 'lol'. In this case the filter made a mistake. Big deal. They need to continue to improve it. Anyone calling this censorship is idiotic.

Are you focussing on the post in question, and what it says, or are you just focussing on the notion of a spam filter and silly comments? No one is arguing against spam filters. FB sends a lot of email that serves no purpose other than to try to get a user to log in. Is that "spam"? Would FB be opposed if an email provider filtered all that mail out of the user's mailbox?

The question is: Does the post in question appear to contribute anything to a conversation? Or not? Perhaps it appears to promote other websites and seems a bit short on "content"? What makes it "spam"?

Look at the words the post contains.

If FB is really having trouble with spam, then that speaks to the design of FB. Does every FB user need to use a website on the open internet, that any spammer can access, to contact their friends and family?

The FB employee says they shut off the filter. I think that speaks for itself.

I think that's an overwhelmingly negative perspective. Facebook was (for me, at least) a draw initially because it wasn't drowning in crap like MySpace was. It was a locked down experience, and everyone benefitted from it. In all honesty, I don't see this as a dramatic move away from that idea.

The MySpace interface was an abomination. The fact that users would tolerate it says something about the standard one has to meet to hold an audience. It's not very high.

FB has a clean interface, generally, but it's what's going on "behind the scenes" that is at issue here.

I'm not sure why you got downvoted for calling the MySpace interface 'an abomination'. It's hard to find a better word for it.

MySpace was very weird in that it seemed like they didn't want you to alter your page. I know that statement seems odd, but there wasn't an easy way to do this. To make changes they didn't offer a UI to set up your own CSS or simply changes colors/backgrounds/etc without CSS, you essentially used JS injection on a couple fields to get the page to look like you wanted. If they had limited what people could do it, or gave them an easier avenue to do it, MySpace might not have lost as much traffic once the much 'prettier' Facebook came out.

To understand why MySpace was designed like it was, perhaps it's helpful to look at the man behind the orginal MySpace: it's the guy behind Demand Media.

They own the domain name registrar eNom and Google SEO operations like eHow.

His idea is to churn out millions of pages of primarily machine-generated "content".

Very little human input is required.

This is enough to fool the search engine that it's what people want. Because the generated pages reflect what the search data says people are searching for.

But as anyone who has opened one of these pages knows, it has a certain "feel" to it. It vacuous. It's cheap.

It's also effective.

He earns a few pennies by having gotten you to look at the page, and once that's done, it matters little what you do or what you think next. Mission accomplished. In the aggregate, this design makes him money.

If you understand how a company like eNom makes money it also arguably fits with this sort of mass production idea.

It may be that MySpace was designed around the idea of mass production of "user-generated" pages. As a sort of fly trap to catch web surfers and searchers, similar to the way eHow or eNom would. Get users to help generate the pages. Not much input is needed. Just a little.

This is just how I see it. I could be wrong.

The MySpace interface in and of itself was OK, especially for the time when it was made. It's what MySpace allowed users to do with it that was an abomination.

I think you need to adjust that tin-foil hat of yours.

Facebook isn't going anywhere. And it is because of decisions like this that it will continue to grow. People want a high SNR for comments. It encourages you to contribute more to a discussion not less.

If you want ASCII, LOL nonsense stick to 4chan.