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A user who never posts anything suddenly posting a message containing urls might in itself be a signal that something is weird. It would be an interestint test to post something not linux related and see how that fares.

No this is a supported / common format on facebook.

Source: I work building an SMM tool, and Facebook Link posts constantly need our attention

> A user who never posts anything suddenly posting a message containing urls might in itself be a signal that something is weird.

...on a social media site designed to aggregate URLs?

Facebook is not designed to aggregate URLs and heavily penalizes external content
Any user ever posting URLs should never ever be removed. The Web should be allowed to exist. This is utterly despicable behavior.
Clearly there is content that would be unacceptable to post. Anything patently illegal, for example.
Or websites that look exactly like paypal, whose URLs begin in paypal.com (followed by a dot, not a slash), but that are, in fact, not Paypal.

I think that's a much more pressing concern.

the parent said: to block things that are illegal. phishing is illegal.
Insanity. Absolutely. Maybe.

Clearly there's a need for some kind of bad-url blocker. You don't want compromised accounts (or clueless people) sharing nefarious links to trusted friends.

And clearly blocking distrowatch etc is bizarre overreach. And probably not intended behaviour -- it just makes no sense.

The web exists just fine. Using Facebook as a front end to the web is a terrible idea though.

I once posted a Youtube comment with a link. Got removed without notice. I thought it was the uploader first but no ...
Amusingly, new YouTube channels can't themselves put links in the description of their own videos even.

They really dislike this whole hypertext thing.

They really want Xanadu's for-profit linking.
Imagine how bad that could have been, had it happened - extrapolating from the current state of the web.
I'm pretty sure I still see spam links in youtube comments though.
Yeah, anything with a link gets silently removed.

Wikipedia links seem to be an exception, maybe that’s special-cased.

The internet would look like the spam folder of a compromised email address. No thanks.
Mastodon does not restrict the posting of URLs and it does not look like “the spam folder of a compromised email address” at all.
Mastodon isn't in charge of moderation though, that's up to the individual instances.

Also, Mastodon is tiny, and spam is a numbers game.

But are you not somewhat agreeing with the point that you're implicitly arguing against: "[This isn't a problem] if I [am] only seeing updates from the people I actually know and explicitly connected to on the social graph. The current problem exists because the content is chosen algorithmically."

The size of a total network is irrelevant until you start randomly connecting nodes.

Yet. There are lots of sign spam is coming to Mastodon and there is real concern by a fair number of people who are there. Anyone with a lot of followers will be tagged often by spam (if you tag someone all their followers will see your post)
The simplest explanation for this would be that spammers are not targeting Mastodon.
As someone who uses Mastodon I can assure you that spammers do target mastodon. So far it is only a few though and so human moderators are able to keep up. I doubt that will last long.
Mastodon looks like a barely used social network instead.
Not if I only seeing updates from the people I actually know and explicitly connected to on the social graph.

The current problem exists because the content is chosen algorithmically

No. Even then. You may know assholes. User accounts may be compromised. Users may have different tolerances for gore that you don’t.

Not gotchas, I’m not arguing for the sake of it, but these are pretty common situations.

I always urge people to volunteer as mods for a bit.

At least you may see a different way to approach thing, or else you might be able to articulate the reasons the rule can’t be followed better.

Would not a less draconian solution then to be to hide the link requiring the user to click through a [This link has been hidden due to linking to [potential malware/sexually explicit content/graphically violent content/audio of a loud Brazilian orgasm/an image that has nothing to do with goats/etc] Type "I understand" here ________ to reveal the link.]?

You get the benefits of striving to warn users, without the downsides of it being abusive, or seen as abusive.

Lord do I wish that were true. The main reason I left Facebook was less the algorithmic content I was getting from strangers, and more the political bile that my increasingly fanatical extended family and past acquaintances chose to write.
You would be surprised at the amount of crap that exists and the amount of malware that posts to fb
When you browse without a Pihole and a blocker, it does.
...have you seen the internet in the last 30 years? That's exactly what remains.
You should know that this sort of rhetoric is both

a) silly, because... it's not true. Spam, phishing attempts, illegal content - all of this should be removed.

b) more damaging to whatever you're advocating for than you realize. You want a free web? So do I. But I'm not going to go around saying stuff like "all users should be able to post any URL at any time" and calling moderation actions "utterly despicable"

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