I seriously can’t understand why there’s so much respect for anyone that works at Meta.
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.
It's like the best of the best mechanical and electrical engineers have teamed up to build the world's most efficient orphan crushing machine. It sips power, runs cool, requires almost no maintenance, and pulverizes orphans into dense little cubes for easy clean up.
Similar to how Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, etc. used tiny fractions of their wealth, on things that would bolster the opinions of the public. They’re laudable, but become less so when you see the bigger picture. Those free software tools are things that Meta needs for its own operations, and their moat is so vast that they can give them away for free and benefit from public participation.
> their mission of destroying the fabric of society and the mental well-being of teenagers
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.
It opened the floodgates, though. It was a real paradigm shift. After LLaMa, everybody saw that you could release large open models without any negative repercussions, and DeepSeek et al. hopped aboard the wagon. LLaMa was the first popular model that was truly open to the global public.
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.
Let's stop saying that open weight models are open source. They are just a software that you can run on your own hardware (if you have a ton of money to spend to get it anyway) but they are not open, they are as open as any proprietary software that you can run on your PC is.
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.
> I seriously can’t understand why there’s so much respect for anyone that works at Meta.
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.
> These people have arguably contributed nothing to society for over a decade […] they’re being praised for being the example of best engineers.
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.
what is react responsible for? If you're referring to the explosion of SPAs, I think you should direct your blame to angularjs... React was just a better version of that revolution.
Agreed. React, imo, was a much better Backbone.js. Relatively lightweight primitives, composition, and JSX made building frontend applications fun without having to wire up everything by hand.
In a weird way, I'm kind of glad that they're ruining facebook.com.
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.
Society basically says money = good. God forbid we treat a sex worker with respect but if you're precious little Johnny works at Facebook finding new and exciting ways to get teenagers even more addicted to their phones it's all good because he makes a lot of money and money = good.
There are tons of sex workers that rake in money that even FAANG engineers will never see in 10 lives (e.g OF 'models'). I doubt much of society has any respect for them though.
> and yet they’re being praised for being the example of best engineers.
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.
As someone who helps small businesses create their own websites... thank you Facebook! Seriously though, back when "Facebook Pages instead of websites" were all the rage, FB demoting page content in feeds officially killed that movement and I was similarly happy.
Well, there should be someway to fund all the ai efforts. On the other hand, I am hoping this reduces the extremely polarizing posts that seem to fill fb these days.
I wonder if this is an effort to combat pages which post a short clickbait description and require you to click "read more" to see the full description, and often post the link in the comments. There are lots of sites (Polygon immediately comes to mind) which are notorious for doing this as a way to get fake engagement which boosts their posts which gets more clickbait engagement.
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".
I have a friend who is a best-selling author, and her threads account was being heavily throttled (hundreds of likes a few months ago, fewer than ten now) -- it was suggested that it's because she is posting links away from Meta properties, and the way around it was this "link in the comments" tactic.
So it's not necessarily clickbait -- seems to be also an evolved workaround to fight throttling. :-/
Yeah I mean it's a problem I'm in groups that just get tons of spam to things off-site that are mainly scams or just fake to get you to view a an ad-ridden page.
In the 2010s, there was a move away from files in the name of convenience (lock-in).
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”)
Remember how Sears was a thing but they kept making dumb decisions and were also unable to adapt to new realities? Facebook/Meta is like that. Doomed company walking.
Sometimes I have thoughts like this, but then I get on the subway and watch everyone around me endlessly scroll Instagram while their brains melt out their ears, and then I decide that I was the one who was out of touch.
I’d agree except most over the age of 45-50 will never leave FB for other platforms. They’ve got decades of milking money out of that cow before it dies completely
Instagram already does charge for outgoing links, so I would assume that they found that they can sustainably make money with it there, and that it should work on FB too.
LinkedIn has seriously deranked posts with links in the past. Everything within Meta is heavily A/B tested, but it seems feasible that this will become real.
I think this is far too charitable an interpretation. They could just ban spammers. Facebook doesn’t want links going off of their platform because they get paid for people staying on their platform and looking at ads.
It's a tactic, the only the latest of many, to go after people who use Facebook to communicate without paying for ads (that is to say - without paying current auction prices for the attention of the recipients of their messages.)
Surveillance capitalists have built a truly miserable internet.
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.
Is this not a good idea? It makes average users more selective about what content they are sharing, and reduces scam/bot content that can currently spam post links for free.
Facebook knows what you want to see, because you can follow pages and individuals. They choose to show those scam/bot posts to you anyway. This isn't to fight bots.
Very few spam/scam posts I see rely on external links. FB is an all in one scammers paradise. This just seems like a transparent attempt to keep people on platform.
Those 35 links to "you wouldn't believe which politician wants to kill our kids now" type posts are why I quit facebook. There is value in know what my friends are doing, but the negative value of that hate isn't worth it.
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.
Yep, it will basically mean the death of Facebook. I don’t use it much, but the groups I’m in are for sharing local events (usually link to library page, map for meetup location, etc). Without links, those groups go away.
This is a bi-directional play. For the vast majority that dont, this is an attempt to get more content INSIDE the facebook ecosystem as a moat, and for those that need outside content links they will pay since its a organic premium conversion.
Not defending it, just explaining the logic and why it might work even if it seems superficially stupid.
I hate to devil's advocate this. But is the observed behavior of 'is this an outgoing link' the only practical way to defend against external bot advertising campaigns? Aside from Facebook obviously wanting you to pay them for advertising, how does any independent forum deal with this at scale without banning links?
"how does any independent forum deal with this at scale without banning links?"
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.
I suffer using it because many people jumped ship from Craigslist to Facebook Marketplace.
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.
They are in the squeezing what's left position for that platform. Young kids think of facebook like we think of myspace. Social media as a platform in fact may just be over. my kids don't really use social media, they use whatsapp/iphone groups.
in fact... maybe kids think of instagram as a boomer unc platform now too.
While it's been longer-lasting than many, social media is a fad and all fads eventually decline. Fundamentally it doesn't do anything that can't be done in a group chat. Thanks to the "forever memory" of the internet, people have learned the risks of posting anything where it will be scraped and preserved for eternity, ready to haunt you when it's most awkward.
Can we just stop using Facebook as a defacto business/organizational page? come on people. I've been login-gated from what should be public pages for the better part of a decade now.
On Google's Youtube to post links (like in video descriptions, etc) you have to pay by adding sellable/monetarily valuable personally identifying information to your account like a phone number and ID. Otherwise even with a google account from 2006 in good standing you can't post links anymore. Attempts to edit old video descriptions with HTTP/S links (from before the policy) also don't work.
I seriously can’t understand why there’s so much respect for anyone that works at Meta.
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.
I have some respect for Meta Research for the good they did releasing Torch, FastText vectors, and the LLaMa models among others for free.
How does this work fits with their mission of destroying the fabric of society and the mental well-being of teenagers, I cannot explain.
It's like the best of the best mechanical and electrical engineers have teamed up to build the world's most efficient orphan crushing machine. It sips power, runs cool, requires almost no maintenance, and pulverizes orphans into dense little cubes for easy clean up.
Similar to how Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, etc. used tiny fractions of their wealth, on things that would bolster the opinions of the public. They’re laudable, but become less so when you see the bigger picture. Those free software tools are things that Meta needs for its own operations, and their moat is so vast that they can give them away for free and benefit from public participation.
ZSTD as well.
> their mission of destroying the fabric of society and the mental well-being of teenagers
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.
> I have some respect ... I cannot explain.
Naturally, they do it to earn "some respect" from those who otherwise see them clearly.
wasn't LLaMa only open source because it had already leaked anyways? And they wanted to spin it in a positive light for their stakeholders.
It opened the floodgates, though. It was a real paradigm shift. After LLaMa, everybody saw that you could release large open models without any negative repercussions, and DeepSeek et al. hopped aboard the wagon. LLaMa was the first popular model that was truly open to the global public.
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.
Let's stop saying that open weight models are open source. They are just a software that you can run on your own hardware (if you have a ton of money to spend to get it anyway) but they are not open, they are as open as any proprietary software that you can run on your PC is.
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.
> it was very brave, and very influential. In my eyes, it outweighs everything negative they've ever done.
Are you being sarcastic? Please let it be that you’re being sarcastic.
Getting paid half a million TC at Meta beats only making 150k as a DoD contractor.
You’re arguably a war criminal either way, might as well get top dollar.
> I seriously can’t understand why there’s so much respect for anyone that works at Meta.
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.
> These people have arguably contributed nothing to society for over a decade […] they’re being praised for being the example of best engineers.
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.
> revolutionized the web
Personally I hate what react has done to the web.
what is react responsible for? If you're referring to the explosion of SPAs, I think you should direct your blame to angularjs... React was just a better version of that revolution.
Did the makers of anuglarjs also have a conflict of interest? Or did they ruin the web just for the love of the game?
Agreed. React, imo, was a much better Backbone.js. Relatively lightweight primitives, composition, and JSX made building frontend applications fun without having to wire up everything by hand.
Angular would've done the same thing but more poorly
React was over a decade ago.
React is kinda shit.
The salaries aren't based on contribution to society, they are based on contribution to Meta. Fat salaries come from fat contributions.
In a weird way, I'm kind of glad that they're ruining facebook.com.
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.
PyTorch .. React ..
That two libraries already build Frontend and AI.
Society basically says money = good. God forbid we treat a sex worker with respect but if you're precious little Johnny works at Facebook finding new and exciting ways to get teenagers even more addicted to their phones it's all good because he makes a lot of money and money = good.
There are tons of sex workers that rake in money that even FAANG engineers will never see in 10 lives (e.g OF 'models'). I doubt much of society has any respect for them though.
> and yet they’re being praised for being the example of best engineers.
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.
thank you for saying this. We have to bring back shaming in tech.
As someone who helps small businesses create their own websites... thank you Facebook! Seriously though, back when "Facebook Pages instead of websites" were all the rage, FB demoting page content in feeds officially killed that movement and I was similarly happy.
Well, there should be someway to fund all the ai efforts. On the other hand, I am hoping this reduces the extremely polarizing posts that seem to fill fb these days.
I wonder if this is an effort to combat pages which post a short clickbait description and require you to click "read more" to see the full description, and often post the link in the comments. There are lots of sites (Polygon immediately comes to mind) which are notorious for doing this as a way to get fake engagement which boosts their posts which gets more clickbait engagement.
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".
I have a friend who is a best-selling author, and her threads account was being heavily throttled (hundreds of likes a few months ago, fewer than ten now) -- it was suggested that it's because she is posting links away from Meta properties, and the way around it was this "link in the comments" tactic.
So it's not necessarily clickbait -- seems to be also an evolved workaround to fight throttling. :-/
Yeah I mean it's a problem I'm in groups that just get tons of spam to things off-site that are mainly scams or just fake to get you to view a an ad-ridden page.
In the 2010s, there was a move away from files in the name of convenience (lock-in).
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”)
Presumably this is an A/B test? I don't see how that's remotely sustainable
Remember how Sears was a thing but they kept making dumb decisions and were also unable to adapt to new realities? Facebook/Meta is like that. Doomed company walking.
Sometimes I have thoughts like this, but then I get on the subway and watch everyone around me endlessly scroll Instagram while their brains melt out their ears, and then I decide that I was the one who was out of touch.
History tells us that a large portion of the population can be out of touch. Sometimes almost everybody in a given society.
I’d agree except most over the age of 45-50 will never leave FB for other platforms. They’ve got decades of milking money out of that cow before it dies completely
One can hope.
Agreed, they are eating the seed corn with this one
Instagram already does charge for outgoing links, so I would assume that they found that they can sustainably make money with it there, and that it should work on FB too.
LinkedIn has seriously deranked posts with links in the past. Everything within Meta is heavily A/B tested, but it seems feasible that this will become real.
Do they even know what H stands for in HTML?
archived facebook help page, no trackers: https://nonograph.com/about-links-in-organic-facebook-page-p...
source: https://www.facebook.com/help/1929252614431792
I love that they specified that links in ads do not count
Seems like an anti spam measure. Bad actors ruin all features where links can be placed in front of eyes.
I think this is far too charitable an interpretation. They could just ban spammers. Facebook doesn’t want links going off of their platform because they get paid for people staying on their platform and looking at ads.
Guess it's a tactic to go after bots and scammers?
It's a tactic, the only the latest of many, to go after people who use Facebook to communicate without paying for ads (that is to say - without paying current auction prices for the attention of the recipients of their messages.)
What if i just post a QR code?
Title isn’t fully accurate. This is specifically for business pages. You can still post links on your own profile or groups.
Surveillance capitalists have built a truly miserable internet.
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.
This is to get sites that monetize Facebook as a funnel to pay.
Is this not a good idea? It makes average users more selective about what content they are sharing, and reduces scam/bot content that can currently spam post links for free.
Facebook knows what you want to see, because you can follow pages and individuals. They choose to show those scam/bot posts to you anyway. This isn't to fight bots.
Facebook actively courted publishers so they'd post links to their content on their pages. Now they want to charge them for the privilege.
Very few spam/scam posts I see rely on external links. FB is an all in one scammers paradise. This just seems like a transparent attempt to keep people on platform.
This is for Facebook Pages, not for users. Average facebook daily user can keep posting 35 links a day to their favorite slop site.
Those 35 links to "you wouldn't believe which politician wants to kill our kids now" type posts are why I quit facebook. There is value in know what my friends are doing, but the negative value of that hate isn't worth it.
I wish there were a way to filter links and reshares out of my feed completely.
If it is for that reason and not a money squeezing/enshittification thing, it seems like a big admission their feed algorithm doesn't work.
Rug pull!!!! I love it
Those free and open models though
This can't be sustainable.
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.
Perhaps share QR codes with links. :)
Since links within Meta are free, maybe they are hoping you will bring all the external resources into some Meta property?
Yep, it will basically mean the death of Facebook. I don’t use it much, but the groups I’m in are for sharing local events (usually link to library page, map for meetup location, etc). Without links, those groups go away.
This is a bi-directional play. For the vast majority that dont, this is an attempt to get more content INSIDE the facebook ecosystem as a moat, and for those that need outside content links they will pay since its a organic premium conversion.
Not defending it, just explaining the logic and why it might work even if it seems superficially stupid.
Genuinely, I think having a postal code based swap system run by post offices would be the ideal situation
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
and postal money orders.
So happy. All the fake news will cost much more now. Best case: less shit-links going around. Best case 2: Facebook closes down. No worst case.
In think in the future, they will charge users for posting anything more than x times a months.
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.
They just want kill small web and keep people on their platforms.
I hate to devil's advocate this. But is the observed behavior of 'is this an outgoing link' the only practical way to defend against external bot advertising campaigns? Aside from Facebook obviously wanting you to pay them for advertising, how does any independent forum deal with this at scale without banning links?
"how does any independent forum deal with this at scale without banning links?"
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.
World Wide Web, huh?
Those hyperlinks ain't free, you know.
Of course they’re not free for Meta, as they allow people to access other sites than Facebook.
> World Wide Web
Embrace, extend, extinguish
They need to introduce postage for messages.
Simply insane. But honestly if anyone is using Facebook still that's on them. I can't fathom how people still use it.
I suffer using it because many people jumped ship from Craigslist to Facebook Marketplace.
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.
late 2025: Facebook tests £9.99 monthly subscription for sharing more than two links https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46314668
They are in the squeezing what's left position for that platform. Young kids think of facebook like we think of myspace. Social media as a platform in fact may just be over. my kids don't really use social media, they use whatsapp/iphone groups.
in fact... maybe kids think of instagram as a boomer unc platform now too.
While it's been longer-lasting than many, social media is a fad and all fads eventually decline. Fundamentally it doesn't do anything that can't be done in a group chat. Thanks to the "forever memory" of the internet, people have learned the risks of posting anything where it will be scraped and preserved for eternity, ready to haunt you when it's most awkward.
This is last stage capitalism of these tech platforms.
Nothing much left to innovate.
Can we just stop using Facebook as a defacto business/organizational page? come on people. I've been login-gated from what should be public pages for the better part of a decade now.
On Google's Youtube to post links (like in video descriptions, etc) you have to pay by adding sellable/monetarily valuable personally identifying information to your account like a phone number and ID. Otherwise even with a google account from 2006 in good standing you can't post links anymore. Attempts to edit old video descriptions with HTTP/S links (from before the policy) also don't work.
I'm not sure a phone number is particularly valuable. It is a decent way pretty much ensure that you aren't a bot, though.