Facebook bans, sends C&D letter to developer of Unfollow Everything extension(techspot.com)
techspot.com
Facebook bans, sends C&D letter to developer of Unfollow Everything extension
https://www.techspot.com/news/91650-facebook-bans-sends-cease-desist-letter-developer-unfollow.html
583 comments
I have been thinking about the difference between human users and computational agents. There is a widespread pattern of enforcing that only human users may interact with a service, not computational agents. Running a user-installed extension is one example; additional examples are CAPTCHAs, account verification by phone number, or services which refuse to provide API access such as banks.
Sometimes the reason is to protect users (e.g. banks), sometimes to protect the service from abuse. But often the reason is to ensure value can be extracted from users (e.g. serving ad impressions) or the power that can be exerted over users. Regardless, I believe this comes down to power: computer scientists understand that acting through a computational agent is fundamentally more powerful than acting directly as a human user. Computational agents can operate at scale, they provide virtualization (e.g. throwaway identities), and thereby conserve the ultimate scarce resource: our attention. Many systems seem to have computational power asymmetry as their fundamental principle: as little human contact on the system's side as possible; as much human contact on the user's side as possible.
If there's any path ahead that avoids a totalitarian nightmare resulting from asymptotic concentration of power, it depends on cultivating a more widespread understanding of computational power and developing new social norms and policies. As a CS educator, this is one of my top priorities.
Sometimes the reason is to protect users (e.g. banks), sometimes to protect the service from abuse. But often the reason is to ensure value can be extracted from users (e.g. serving ad impressions) or the power that can be exerted over users. Regardless, I believe this comes down to power: computer scientists understand that acting through a computational agent is fundamentally more powerful than acting directly as a human user. Computational agents can operate at scale, they provide virtualization (e.g. throwaway identities), and thereby conserve the ultimate scarce resource: our attention. Many systems seem to have computational power asymmetry as their fundamental principle: as little human contact on the system's side as possible; as much human contact on the user's side as possible.
If there's any path ahead that avoids a totalitarian nightmare resulting from asymptotic concentration of power, it depends on cultivating a more widespread understanding of computational power and developing new social norms and policies. As a CS educator, this is one of my top priorities.
I manually unfollowed almost every friend and every page I followed a couple years ago. My feed is now a very limited selection of gaming and media posts that I enjoy immensely. No politics at all and almost nothing in my feed from actual individuals that I know. I ended up enjoying Facebook again, even if in a very different way.
It was a tedious process and a tool like this could help a lot of people find their own value in the platform by getting a fresh start. Sadly, FB has no interest in that and would rather corral us in ways as to maximize their own benefit, not ours.
It was a tedious process and a tool like this could help a lot of people find their own value in the platform by getting a fresh start. Sadly, FB has no interest in that and would rather corral us in ways as to maximize their own benefit, not ours.
Facebook engineers lurking on HN reading this: you are complicit in things like this by developing the technical infrastructure that makes it all possible. If your motivation is money, you can absolutely find that employment elsewhere.
The cease and desist seemingly has no real legal basis, but I mean you can send a cease and desist for anything you want. My mom was building a shed on her property, some neighbors didn't like it so they had a lawyer send a cease and desist with no legal basis. My mom ignored the C&D and is enjoying her new shed.
The only problem is Facebook is huge and is willing to drag out lawsuits they won't win just to destroy people's lives because they can afford to hold out much longer than everyone else. It's complete abuse of process, and really should be dealt with more harshly than it is.
The only problem is Facebook is huge and is willing to drag out lawsuits they won't win just to destroy people's lives because they can afford to hold out much longer than everyone else. It's complete abuse of process, and really should be dealt with more harshly than it is.
Zuckerberg mentioned how much pride he and the team at Facebook take in their products.
I wonder how much pride they take in users saying the experience is enhanced by orders of magntiude when they unsubscribe from their feeds...
I wonder how much pride they take in users saying the experience is enhanced by orders of magntiude when they unsubscribe from their feeds...
I received a C&D from Facebook many moons ago. I was a young man and absolutely shit myself, to the extent that I don’t even have the source code anymore. All I did was publish some CSS to make Facebook look a little less shitty.
A ban? Fine, whatever, their house their rules.
A cease and desist for making a browser extension that automates a process that any user could themselves do with no special "hacking" required? Absolutely absurd, I hope there is no legal basis for this threat.
A cease and desist for making a browser extension that automates a process that any user could themselves do with no special "hacking" required? Absolutely absurd, I hope there is no legal basis for this threat.
The threat of a lawsuit when the big guy has infinite resources is a scary proposition. Dealing with this can easily cost the developer $10s of 1000s. Basically, corporate bullying. Its not right...
FB also demanded a list of every single domain the developer owns. Seems egregious.
Contrast this action with this paragraph from Zuckerberg's statement 2 days ago:
> At the heart of these accusations is this idea that we prioritize profit over safety and well-being. That's just not true. For example, one move that has been called into question is when we introduced the Meaningful Social Interactions change to News Feed. This change showed fewer viral videos and more content from friends and family -- which we did knowing it would mean people spent less time on Facebook, but that research suggested it was the right thing for people's well-being. Is that something a company focused on profits over people would do?
This ban is the answer the rhetorical question in the last sentence: Yes, this is exactly something a company focused on profits over people would do. Whatever corporate-speak tweaks Facebook makes to the news feed, the one thing it can't abide is people actively choosing what they experience on the site.
> At the heart of these accusations is this idea that we prioritize profit over safety and well-being. That's just not true. For example, one move that has been called into question is when we introduced the Meaningful Social Interactions change to News Feed. This change showed fewer viral videos and more content from friends and family -- which we did knowing it would mean people spent less time on Facebook, but that research suggested it was the right thing for people's well-being. Is that something a company focused on profits over people would do?
This ban is the answer the rhetorical question in the last sentence: Yes, this is exactly something a company focused on profits over people would do. Whatever corporate-speak tweaks Facebook makes to the news feed, the one thing it can't abide is people actively choosing what they experience on the site.
Big prior discussion from yesterday.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28788821
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28788821
you can do it using this script : https://gist.github.com/renestalder/c5b77635bfbec8f94d28 , login, go to your news feed settings -> unfollow -> scroll down all the way to the bottom of the list (it won't work unless you do this!), then copy paste the script into the developer console.
UPDATE: I had to run it a few times, somehow even though it logged that it had unfollowed all of the items, there were still ~40 left the 2nd time, 3 the 3rd time, at which point i just unfollowed the remaining friends/pages manually.
UPDATE: I had to run it a few times, somehow even though it logged that it had unfollowed all of the items, there were still ~40 left the 2nd time, 3 the 3rd time, at which point i just unfollowed the remaining friends/pages manually.
This company is worst than Exxon by at least an order of magnitude. Exploiting humanity and consciousness. What a level of audacity. Eventually MZ will be removed to rebrand.
How can this C&D have any legal basis? This person is providing an extension that is just a piece of software for a browser. The user can choose to 'violate the terms of service' or not. But browser automation isn't something Facebook has the standing to block, I would think.
Also how do they feel about Social Book Post Manager (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/social-book-post-m...), an extension that lets people delete their Facebook history selectively (like all your video views), in bulk? This seems like a basic feature any trustworthy social media platform or technology company in general should provide. But since Facebook doesn't, someone made an extension that helps users out. Unfortunately this extension is out of date and doesn't work in 2021 because it doesn't have '2021' as an option in their date filter, and because Facebook's continual UI changes to the activity log seem to be designed to break this extension, since they certainly provide no benefits to users.
Can some hacker here who has the skills please make a tool to help lay persons clear their posts/comments/likes/etc. one by one for Facebook, Instagram, and the rest?
Also how do they feel about Social Book Post Manager (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/social-book-post-m...), an extension that lets people delete their Facebook history selectively (like all your video views), in bulk? This seems like a basic feature any trustworthy social media platform or technology company in general should provide. But since Facebook doesn't, someone made an extension that helps users out. Unfortunately this extension is out of date and doesn't work in 2021 because it doesn't have '2021' as an option in their date filter, and because Facebook's continual UI changes to the activity log seem to be designed to break this extension, since they certainly provide no benefits to users.
Can some hacker here who has the skills please make a tool to help lay persons clear their posts/comments/likes/etc. one by one for Facebook, Instagram, and the rest?
> a tool that unfollows all connections automatically, potentially making the social network less addictive and depressing.
Having done this manually, I can attest to the increase in the quality of my feed. Every now and then, I need to do the manual work again.
I'm glad that Facebook has streisand effect this extension, I'll look into installing it.
Having done this manually, I can attest to the increase in the quality of my feed. Every now and then, I need to do the manual work again.
I'm glad that Facebook has streisand effect this extension, I'll look into installing it.
Can anyone who works at Facebook speak anonymously about what's going on over there? They seem like they're in full authoritarian meltdown mode...
One of the worst things that could have happened to Facebook is the whole Cambridge Analytica thing; now they can always just hide behind the veneer of "we disable scripting/API access to x degree because something something hand waiving black magic user safety third party developers and do you want another scandal like we had with CA" even when they may be completely different situations
Someone should create a gofundme page for the guy to fight this nonsense in court.
He could counter-sue Facebook to at least get back on the platform, if he wants. A Dutch politician recently won a lawsuit against LinkedIn, which banned his account for posting sensational nonsense about COVID. The Dutch judge ruled that LinkedIn was within the law to remove his posts, but also that a lifetime ban was disproportional.
As much as this sucks, I can’t say that I’m surprised. I made a script to unfollow everything 2 years ago (and I did the same to Twitter). Shared the script on GitHub gists so the few people who were willing to open the console and paste the code in would do so. Several people asked me to make an extension. It would have been trivial but I refused because I figured that would put me on FB’s radar and get me banned. Just running the script was nerve wracking in case I triggered some detection mechanism (I inserted random times between actions to avoid it if possible).
If I was this person I’d have done this as anonymously as possible.
What’s more sucky though is that at least with Twitter I was able to use the api for this. FB has locked down their APIs for personal use which resulted in having to script browser actions :-/
If I was this person I’d have done this as anonymously as possible.
What’s more sucky though is that at least with Twitter I was able to use the api for this. FB has locked down their APIs for personal use which resulted in having to script browser actions :-/
In a similar vein, I've been using News Feed Eradicator:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicat...
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicat...
I am actually curious about the need for such an extension.
What's the point of reading your Facebook feed if you don't want to follow anything? Just don't read your feed. I kind of like the fact that my feed is so terrible, it makes me want to leave quickly and not come back.
Facebook is good to get in touch with friends, it is excellent to organize events, mostly because of its popularity. But when it comes to the feed, for some reason, for me, it has a signal to noise ratio close to zero. Even content coming from real friends I hold in high regard is terrible, as if Facebook makes the worst out of people. The best I can hope for are moderately funny jokes and memes, beside that, nothing is salvageable.
What's the point of reading your Facebook feed if you don't want to follow anything? Just don't read your feed. I kind of like the fact that my feed is so terrible, it makes me want to leave quickly and not come back.
Facebook is good to get in touch with friends, it is excellent to organize events, mostly because of its popularity. But when it comes to the feed, for some reason, for me, it has a signal to noise ratio close to zero. Even content coming from real friends I hold in high regard is terrible, as if Facebook makes the worst out of people. The best I can hope for are moderately funny jokes and memes, beside that, nothing is salvageable.
I went looking for the (Chrome) Extension and found:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unfollow-everyone-...
It's called "Unfollow Everyone" though. Is it the same thing? The only clue about the developer identity is the email address, '[email protected]' and the developer is "TMP".
I'm curious -- if FB pressures Goog to delist the extension, would this open them up to anti-trust action?
Also I wonder if the Everyone -> Everything was a mistake, or an intentional misdirect to avoid a Streisand effect?
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unfollow-everyone-...
It's called "Unfollow Everyone" though. Is it the same thing? The only clue about the developer identity is the email address, '[email protected]' and the developer is "TMP".
I'm curious -- if FB pressures Goog to delist the extension, would this open them up to anti-trust action?
Also I wonder if the Everyone -> Everything was a mistake, or an intentional misdirect to avoid a Streisand effect?
I did this a few years ago to make Facebook boring, unfollowing is not enough you also need to add and follow random people from groups you have no interest in.
Spanish rap groups for example, then like every post by these people.
It worked really well, when ever I went on by habbit there was complete random stuff in a language I didn't understand.
Also try and follow only males for obvious reasons and disable people being able to find you and write to you wall.
This completely broke facebook and broke the habbit.
Over the years of going on once a month I starting getting to know these random people.
This male model from Pakistan who posted duck face photos, nice guy.
I would like something to delete all comments i have ever made, one by one if anyone knows the script.
Spanish rap groups for example, then like every post by these people.
It worked really well, when ever I went on by habbit there was complete random stuff in a language I didn't understand.
Also try and follow only males for obvious reasons and disable people being able to find you and write to you wall.
This completely broke facebook and broke the habbit.
Over the years of going on once a month I starting getting to know these random people.
This male model from Pakistan who posted duck face photos, nice guy.
I would like something to delete all comments i have ever made, one by one if anyone knows the script.
Seems so short sighted, if some subset of users prefer another version of FB, give it to them to make sure they don't leave. The value of FB is the network, keep it healthy instead of doing whatever you can to increase ad real estate.
Great ad for the extension, I wanna try this now.
I logged into FB with chrome (normally use ff). Got the plugin, and ran the unfollower.
Now, my FB feed is empty. It's pretty nice and now tamed. I don't see the usual inflammatory garbage Fb always tries to entice me with.
Now, my FB feed is empty. It's pretty nice and now tamed. I don't see the usual inflammatory garbage Fb always tries to entice me with.
I used to use custom friends lists to achieve the same effect (although I've been off Facebook for maybe a year now), I only saw content from explicitly whom I chose to add to those lists.
Now however when I just checked I can't seem to find a way to browse those "custom friend" feeds anymore. They're located under Friends -> Custom Lists but that only takes me to editing them (seemingly without a purpose). Does anyone happen to know if it's possible to actually use (browse using) those lists or if FB has discontinued the functionality?
Now however when I just checked I can't seem to find a way to browse those "custom friend" feeds anymore. They're located under Friends -> Custom Lists but that only takes me to editing them (seemingly without a purpose). Does anyone happen to know if it's possible to actually use (browse using) those lists or if FB has discontinued the functionality?
We have a serious information overload problem and the level of control provided by that extension is infinitesimal to what should be routinely available to all users.
Here's the extension zip files that were archived from the Chrome Store. You can get all versions back to 1.0.
https://extensions.crxcavator.io/ohceakcebcalehmaliegoenklid... https://extensions.crxcavator.io/ohceakcebcalehmaliegoenklid... https://extensions.crxcavator.io/ohceakcebcalehmaliegoenklid...
They are CRX (Chrome Extension) files, some manual steps needed to unpack, or change .zip to .crx and open with Chrome. https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/q3smfr/unfollo...
Install Instructions: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/q3smfr/unfollo...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/q3smfr/unfollo...