10 ms·

One of the first things you see on that page (on mobile), even above the headline of the article, is a Facebook share button. Facebook has its claws in deep. D

One of the first things you see on that page (on mobile), even above the headline of the article, is a Facebook share button. 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.

lettergram 8y ago
I actually have been ironically sharing many of these posts on Facebook, along with the #deletefacebook tag.
- dingo_bat 8y ago
  I have started posting 1 pic every day on facebook (hadn't posted anything for a year) as soon as I saw the #delete fb propaganda going on.
TAForObvReasons 8y ago
Is there a way to put a "Follow us on Facebook" button without a FB tracker script?
- dingo_bat 8y ago
  You can just put a regular link to your fb page.
- arkh 8y ago
  https://github.com/panzi/SocialSharePrivacy https://github.com/panzi/SocialSharePrivacy You can see an implementation of it on Schneier blog: https://www.schneier.com/ https://www.schneier.com/
- gkoberger 8y ago
  <a href="http://facebook.com/yourpagename">Follow http://facebook.com/yourpagename">Follow us on Facebook!</a>
  - sundvor 8y ago
    Gold. :-) Should probably be https:// https:// though!
    - gkoberger 8y ago
      Why bother? They're gonna just share your info with everyone anyway ;)
- thg 8y ago
  Heise Shariff is one. I've been happily using the typo3 plugin of it for years. https://github.com/heiseonline/shariff https://github.com/heiseonline/shariff
- akkat 8y ago
  A lot of German sites have two buttons. One with no tracking that pressing it causes the "follow up" script to run, and then the "follow us" script that tracks you.
- Gaelan 8y ago
  I think Mozilla might be doing just that.
- dredmorbius 8y ago
  See Bruce Schneier's blog for examples.
jakecopp 8y ago
Are there online RSS feed writers that nontechnical people could use? Reading a pure collection of my friend's RSS feeds would be wonderful. Though to the best of my understanding there is no way of commenting on RSS posts unless you host a site.
- daveFNbuck 8y ago
  Yes, I find Feedly to be quite usable. It also has some social features but I have no idea how those work.
- fitzroy 8y ago
  FriendFeed was great for this (until it was acquired and eventually shut down by Facebook). Seems like a good time to resurrect that idea.
- dawnerd 8y ago
  Newsblur? Theres commenting and it's pretty easy to use.
- zdkl 8y ago
  Have you checked out the ActivityPub spec? https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/#Overview https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/#Overview
  - brylie 8y ago
    FWIW, Mastadon supports ActivityPub: https://hackernoon.com/mastodon-and-the-w3c-f75f376f422 https://hackernoon.com/mastodon-and-the-w3c-f75f376f422
- brylie 8y ago
  For non-technical people, it might be good to help them get set up on Mastadon network: https://joinmastodon.org/ https://joinmastodon.org/ https://instances.social/ https://instances.social/
  - aaron-lebo 8y ago
Tossrock 8y ago
Yeah, I thought that this line: > "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.
- jjeaff 8y ago
  >tracks logged in users 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.
  - eecc 8y ago
    Just curious, but blocking third party cookies would also stop the tracking or it uses some server-side library to embed the cookie in the site’s domain?
  - inlined 8y ago
    JFC. How does logging out of Facebook revoke all OAuth tokens for linked accounts on that machine but they still leave a token to track your movements.
superkuh 8y ago
Also ironic given that Mozilla continues to violate software freedoms by removing control from the very users they pay lip service to protecting. Until they go back on requiring their own cryptographic signature on all add-ons and the Facebook style walled garden this creates these PR moves will fall flat. 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.
- confounded 8y ago
  Can you help us understand the problems with this?
  - bad_user 8y ago
    The problem is that every time Mozilla is mentioned on HN, a contingent will see it as an opportunity to bitch and moan about Mozilla not being the FSF.
    - DonHopkins 8y ago
      Don't get screwed by security! You can easily tell if they're truly sincere RMS disciples or just ersatz RMS poseurs by trying to log in to their account using their login name as their password. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/stallman-kth.html 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”.
downandout 8y ago
Bit of hypocrisy to say 'we're not advertising on Facebook anymore' while leaving those buttons in place. 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.
- fusiongyro 8y ago
  On the other hand, one thing Taleb points out in Fooled by Randomness is that meteoric rises are often followed by catastrophic losses, whereas gains more slowly made are typically also lost more slowly. You can also apply Richard Gott's estimator: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/10/06/we-have-a-pretty-good-idea-of-when-humans-will-go-extinct/?utm_term=.6d2fe96d9a55 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.
  - downandout 8y ago
    If their brand becomes toxic and all the advertisers pull out, how much runway do they have? 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.
Gaelan 8y ago
Looks like it’s not actually Facebook’s share widget, just a plain link, so at least it’s not s privacy issue.
dfxm12 8y ago
Bit of hypocrisy to say 'we're not advertising on Facebook anymore' They actually said they're not going to "support the platform with our advertising dollars." It's not really hypocritical at all...

lettergram 8y ago

I actually have been ironically sharing many of these posts on Facebook, along with the #deletefacebook tag.

dingo_bat 8y ago
I have started posting 1 pic every day on facebook (hadn't posted anything for a year) as soon as I saw the #delete fb propaganda going on.

TAForObvReasons 8y ago

Is there a way to put a "Follow us on Facebook" button without a FB tracker script?

dingo_bat 8y ago
You can just put a regular link to your fb page.
arkh 8y ago
https://github.com/panzi/SocialSharePrivacy https://github.com/panzi/SocialSharePrivacy You can see an implementation of it on Schneier blog: https://www.schneier.com/ https://www.schneier.com/
gkoberger 8y ago
<a href="http://facebook.com/yourpagename">Follow http://facebook.com/yourpagename">Follow us on Facebook!</a>
- sundvor 8y ago
  Gold. :-) Should probably be https:// https:// though!
  - gkoberger 8y ago
    Why bother? They're gonna just share your info with everyone anyway ;)
thg 8y ago
Heise Shariff is one. I've been happily using the typo3 plugin of it for years. https://github.com/heiseonline/shariff https://github.com/heiseonline/shariff
akkat 8y ago
A lot of German sites have two buttons. One with no tracking that pressing it causes the "follow up" script to run, and then the "follow us" script that tracks you.
Gaelan 8y ago
I think Mozilla might be doing just that.
dredmorbius 8y ago
See Bruce Schneier's blog for examples.

jakecopp 8y ago

Are there online RSS feed writers that nontechnical people could use? Reading a pure collection of my friend's RSS feeds would be wonderful. Though to the best of my understanding there is no way of commenting on RSS posts unless you host a site.

daveFNbuck 8y ago
Yes, I find Feedly to be quite usable. It also has some social features but I have no idea how those work.
fitzroy 8y ago
FriendFeed was great for this (until it was acquired and eventually shut down by Facebook). Seems like a good time to resurrect that idea.
dawnerd 8y ago
Newsblur? Theres commenting and it's pretty easy to use.
zdkl 8y ago
Have you checked out the ActivityPub spec? https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/#Overview https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/#Overview
- brylie 8y ago
  FWIW, Mastadon supports ActivityPub: https://hackernoon.com/mastodon-and-the-w3c-f75f376f422 https://hackernoon.com/mastodon-and-the-w3c-f75f376f422
brylie 8y ago
For non-technical people, it might be good to help them get set up on Mastadon network: https://joinmastodon.org/ https://joinmastodon.org/ https://instances.social/ https://instances.social/
- aaron-lebo 8y ago

Tossrock 8y ago

Yeah, I thought that this line: > "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.

jjeaff 8y ago
>tracks logged in users 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.
- eecc 8y ago
  Just curious, but blocking third party cookies would also stop the tracking or it uses some server-side library to embed the cookie in the site’s domain?
- inlined 8y ago
  JFC. How does logging out of Facebook revoke all OAuth tokens for linked accounts on that machine but they still leave a token to track your movements.

superkuh 8y ago

Also ironic given that Mozilla continues to violate software freedoms by removing control from the very users they pay lip service to protecting. Until they go back on requiring their own cryptographic signature on all add-ons and the Facebook style walled garden this creates these PR moves will fall flat. 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.

confounded 8y ago
Can you help us understand the problems with this?
- bad_user 8y ago
  The problem is that every time Mozilla is mentioned on HN, a contingent will see it as an opportunity to bitch and moan about Mozilla not being the FSF.
  - DonHopkins 8y ago
    Don't get screwed by security! You can easily tell if they're truly sincere RMS disciples or just ersatz RMS poseurs by trying to log in to their account using their login name as their password. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/stallman-kth.html 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”.

downandout 8y ago

Bit of hypocrisy to say 'we're not advertising on Facebook anymore' while leaving those buttons in place. 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.

fusiongyro 8y ago
On the other hand, one thing Taleb points out in Fooled by Randomness is that meteoric rises are often followed by catastrophic losses, whereas gains more slowly made are typically also lost more slowly. You can also apply Richard Gott's estimator: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/10/06/we-have-a-pretty-good-idea-of-when-humans-will-go-extinct/?utm_term=.6d2fe96d9a55 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.
- downandout 8y ago
  If their brand becomes toxic and all the advertisers pull out, how much runway do they have? 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.

Gaelan 8y ago

Looks like it’s not actually Facebook’s share widget, just a plain link, so at least it’s not s privacy issue.

dfxm12 8y ago

Bit of hypocrisy to say 'we're not advertising on Facebook anymore' They actually said they're not going to "support the platform with our advertising dollars." It's not really hypocritical at all...