andrewducker | Facebook has blocked Dreamwidth

I discovered, about an hour ago, that all of my posts on Facebook which were links to Dreamwidth had vanished. Suddenly gone as if they'd never existed.

I checked with Denise (one of the owners of Dreamwidth) to find out if she knew about it, and discovered that Facebook have stuck Dreamwidth on a block list.

With no explanation as to why, no way to contact them, and no appeal.

This is unbelievably frustrating. And the kind of centralised, autocratic, opaque decision making which I loathe. Tens of thousands of active users, unable to share blog posts with Facebook (which, let's face it, is where most of my friends go for their socialising).

If anyone knows anyone who works at Facebook, do see if you can prod them into getting an explanation...

Edit: All working fine now.

Crossposts: https://andrewducker.livejournal.com/3903041.html

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

doug

I noped out of Facebook early in the pandemic - it kept showing me frustratingly wrong takes on the virus from people I sort-of knew, and I was spending more and more time carefully explaining things with reliable sources. I'm pretty sure Fb started to clock that this sort of post reliably got more engagement from me. It was getting me more and more wound up, and over and over I would be missing out on the sort of significant news from friends that is why I still stayed on the site. I am really, really pleased to have broken my habit and am not going back.

From:

andrewducker

Yeah, I'd much rather that people were over here than over there. Sadly...

From:

calimac

This demonstrates one reason why I want nothing, whatever, to do with FB. On DW and LJ, your display is of all posts by people you've marked to read, that those people allow you to read, in reverse chronological order. FB doesn't allow that. Instead, they have some weird algorithm deciding what you get to see. F that. I want to follow my friends and the people I enjoy reading. Period.

From:

conuly

It should be possible to view in chronological order, though anecdotally many people report that FB and Twitter keep reversing that decision and you have to reset it manually:

https://www.groovypost.com/howto/view-facebook-twitter-chronological-order/

From:

calimac

This is interesting. Not only do they report that FB keeps reversing your choice, but they also say that even when it's on it doesn't work: things still keep coming in way out of order under algorithm control.

Further, even the guy who shows you how to do this doesn't recommend it, because there's too much material on FB to follow. Which brings up another problem that occurred to me the first time I saw an FB feed: it's too full of trivia. It doesn't have to be that way, but it is. LJ and DW tend towards fewer and more substantive posts, which are what I want to read.

From:

skington

Facebook's "most recent posts first" is an absolute lie. You can refresh the page and it'll show you different things.

From:

ex_inklessej388

And to add insult to injury many of those trivial posts are designed to collect and collate the personal information of you and your friends. It would be one thing if the pointless crap on Facebook was harmless, but it most certainly is not.

From:

calimac

Huh? I'm talking about trivial posts posted by the user. B. unfollowed one friend of ours for his irksome habit of posting photos of every meal he eats. For some reason FB encourages people to post that kind of blither. Are you talking about some kind of post generated automatically by FB from user data? That would be very disturbing, but I know nothing about anything like that.

From:

ex_inklessej388

It's coming out more and more now but a lot of those personality quizzes and "What Game of Thrones character are you" and "What Colour is Your Mood Today" type posts that can tossed around by friends and family are used to collect personal information on you and your friends. It was used by Cambridge Analytica during the last US election and it is coming out more and more how these quizzes are used by phishers to gather personal information on a person over time.

From:

andrewskeen

Must be all the badthink and other thoughtcrime you lot have been committing.

From:

andrewducker

We are *terrible* thinkers over here. Just the worst.

From:

marahmarie

Ah ha ha ha.

From:

dewline

...yeah. I'm sure that's it.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/26/with-facebook-we-are-already-through-the-looking-glass

From:

jack

The potential for this is why I hate walled gardens :( I submitted a report.

I noticed when I posted links I seemed to get little response but I wasn't sure if that was the way I was doing it without enough extract, or Facebook burying the external links. But now I wonder if Dreamwidth was on a "deprioritise list for some reason, eg some fan war got a post massively reported or something.

From:

hellofriendsiminthedark

One of the explicit factors that the facebook algorithm rewards is content that gets people to stay on the site. No doubt long videos with high view counts good, external links to non-affiliates bad.

From:

dewline

About to test this for myself...and confirmed. "Against Community Standards". I've filed a complaint via Facebook's automated appeal-filing tool, and will see what happens. I have posted a complaint about the blockage on my own Facebook page and made it "public" so that everyone on Facebook can see it.

Edited Date: 2020-07-26 02:00 pm (UTC)

From:

strange_complex

I did the debug report, which initially prompted a message saying "We can't review this website because the content doesn't meet our Community Standards. If you think this is a mistake, please let us know." I followed the 'let us know' bit, which was a link, and was able to submit a report there in a text box. I'm not very optimistic, but at least we've tried something.

From:

rhythmaning

Jesus! That's awful. And very creepy. The lack of transparency is disgusting.

"We can't review this website because the content doesn't meet our Community Standards. If you think this is a mistake, please let us know."

Reported!

Fuck that.

From:

inamac

I could almost understand them blocking AO3, but not DW. I wonder about IJ, which my current browser marks as an unsafe site.

From:

alexseanchai

Why AO3? Bc if the "problem" is AO3 has porn, well, that's the most likely reason I can think of for FB to ban DW, is DW has porn.

From:

cmcmck

This is why I stick to this 'ere and not that there...............

From:

mountainkiss

Heh. I'm playing for the other team here. I was just about to stop following here and revert to seeing the posts on FB, because I struggle so with the automated cross-posting. Very unsure what to do now! Really hope you can get it sorted.

From:

andrewducker

Oh, all of my non Dreamwidth links are still there. So you can see everything over there without a problem.

It'll only be my posts here you won't see that way, and very few of those aren't link collections at the moment.

From:

mountainkiss

Well, those are probably the ones I care about most. But I suppose I can just do a regular check.

From:

andrewducker

Everything's working again, you can use whatever works for you best :-)

From:

mountainkiss

Oh that's great, thanks so much.

From:

ironymaiden

ugh, just what facebook wants, to have control of your personal life. i quite enjoy the occasional glimpse of your sweet family, learning about your link collecting setup, etc.

i've reported the issue including a "this is like blocking Tumblr or Medium" because i assume that might ring a bell somewhere. (i literally have a DW tag called 'motherfucking facebook'.)

From:

ironymaiden

I tried to make a text post about this issue on my facebook page with a link to the debugger AND THEY BLOCKED IT.

From:

alexanderr

you could, in principle, solve the problem by shortening all your links to dreamwidth.
using tiny url, for example, or a similar service. this has already been verified as a working approach.
until, of course, facebook figures that one out as well. they can ban all shortened urls,
or they could start looking where they lead