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".
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josefresco
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.
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meerita
I quit Facebook in 2012. I cannot imagine what's there but in 2019 I had to create a new account to test some development stuff, and checked friends and family and it was pretty much dead.
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rickcarlino
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”)
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codingisfreedom
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.
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Kim_Bruning
Presumably this is an A/B test? I don't see how that's remotely sustainable
Not just Pages, but I've read this is also coming to any user who at some point in the past clicked the prompt to turn their account into a "pro" one. I did it long ago, just to see what info it would give me; then found little of interest, and forgot about it. Since then people have followed me who didn't friend me. Now, I can revert to a non-pro account (gaining ability to post more than 2 links) but I'd lose all the non-friend followers. Whatever. It's amazing how much junk FB is now. My feed is mostly crap from people/pages I don't follow and have no interest in.
tapland
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.
The chosen thresholds are a bit absurd — e.g. if it was five rather than two I think authentic users would barely notice — but this actually might be what is needed to make Facebook useful again for people.
The amount of fake link spam, "link in comments" spam, misleading shit, is endless.
No amount of anti-spam technology is going to help. Cold hard cash requirement might do something about it.
If you assume that the only reason to run a fake celebrity page, for example, is to mislead users into some action, this might help there. Though actually what is needed there is a similar price pattern on posting email addresses.
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tapvt
My facebook account was taken over by someone, but the safeguards locked it down. I can't access it. Neither, hopefully, can the bad actor.
I don't miss it, though I feel uncomfortable about the situation. Recovery has not been worth the time involved.
What sucks is that now I can't see a whole ton of local content: local event organizers, small businesses, municipal offices and agencies, community groups, etc. have all consolidated on "facebook" as where every announcement goes.
I hope they continue to make it a more obviously hostile walled garden and that organizations of all kinds move away. The network effect it has may be hard to overcome, however.
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TrackerFF
Guess it's a tactic to go after bots and scammers?
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RegW
So is this a kite for one way to commercialize all of Meta's platforms? Or perhaps just a way to kill off a dead business under the guise of a failed experiment?
nunez
I really hope this makes business websites great again. And using Google Maps to publish business updates. The number of times I've gone to a business during their open hours only to learn that they're closed and that the update was published to Facebook or Instagram is absurd.
kalabrium
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.
xlayn
It's an echo chamber, breaking it, allowing sound from the outside to come in has to be expensive because it breaks the main thing it stands for....
Remember from their own mouths the social aspect of the thing is dead... is only the manipulation, and now you can "tune" the interactions with LLMs so you hear exactly what someone pays for you to hear...
zahrevsky
Do they even know what H stands for in HTML?
bentt
No municipal or public entity should use Facebook as a means of distributing information.
yipinwong
Why not go with Youtube route of force-feeding/shoving ADs in our face for having to share more links?
1. This will force users to keep sharing
2. get more ADs revenue
3. People get fed up and switch to $50/ month plan
similar to how Youtube did. I am fed up and ended up signing upf or youtube premimum.
amelius
I want Yellow Pages, not Facebook Pages. And ditch any other form of ad.
1970-01-01
>Don't know why we bother with them.
It's very much a bandwagon mentality. "We" is you.
SwellJoe
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.
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billyp-rva
Fun historical note: one of the first applications of the internet was the "world wide web" (WWW). The idea was people that people would host HTML files on the internet that would be connect to each other using "links" to form a web of "sites" (called, of course, "websites"). You can still find these websites on the internet if you leave the walled gardens and paywalls, but it takes some effort.
twodave
Almost certainly a way to mitigate bots and spam. Not surprised in the slightest.
Benard-dev
I didn't know this and kept sharing links on my new page and it was banned from posting.I tried to look for support but just received responses from bots all the time and no human review until I gave up. I ended up starting another page.
totetsu
What if i just post a QR code?
ktosobcy
Extortionist mafia is getting more extorionist...
EU should just blok meta(fb/inst)/x|twatter/tiktok and rest of usanian BigTech at this point…
mightyham
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.
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mcmcmc
Probably an unpopular take, but this is not a bad thing. Maybe weird on it being for link sharing, but it’s always been deeply anticompetitive to offer a free webpage. It’s bad for the market for them to set the price of hosting a webpage for a business at zero, and the network effects make it easier for them to lock businesses in
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stared
It has been disincentivising links for quite some time, so more opinions and fluff, fewer quality posts and links to external materials.
gregglain
I joked to wife about paying for Facebook in 2011.
Monopolies suck.
sirnicolaz
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.
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verelo
Curious how this affects the api. Feels like a big breaking change which I’ve heard nothing about.
jstummbillig
Those free and open models though
binlog
Title isn’t fully accurate. This is specifically for business pages. You can still post links on your own profile or groups.
DataDaemon
They just want kill small web and keep people on their platforms.
ciefa
Simply insane. But honestly if anyone is using Facebook still that's on them.
I can't fathom how people still use it.
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fg137
I mean, this isn't really a surprise. On many social media platforms, you get instantly banned/shadowbanned if you post an external link, if you can publish that post in the first place at all. From the platform's perspective, there is almost no incentive to allow external links (spam, leakage etc). There is no law to mandate that third party links must be allowed.
I don't like this but also don't see how this can be different in the real world.
nprateem
And I just discovered today that posting a tweet via the X API costs $0.20 if it contains a link. They'll all head this way as they think they're too big to fail.
BatchJob
Rug pull!!!! I love it
AndrewKemendo
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
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sixhobbits
yep, run a small non-tech business too (new for me) so I got to learn all about 'normie' FB marketing and it's absolutely trash from a business perspective
- we had this link limit for a few months already
- every business portal to upload content etc is super buggy, just shows loading spinners, you never know if a post has worked or not
- we're locked out of our instagram account as we took it over from old owners who don't know password and none of the reset options arrive even though they have access to them
- we finally got an email 2fa to go through to recover the account and that then asked for the SMS too, which never arrives
- there is of course absolutely no way to contact support
Unfortunately it's the only platform all our customers are on. They don't even have Google accounts, it's all WhatsApp, Facebook and phones.
rcr-anti
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?
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shevy-java
Don't become dependent on these greedy corporations.
f311a
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.
sailfast
Said it before, but this company's product managers are pure evil.
Engineers are enablers at best. If you are not trapped there by visa issues or vesting problems you should take your money and RUN.
seydor
You either get stuck into facebook's tight grip on people's perpetual brain rot, or in google/apple's notification gardens. Welcome to the free and open internet.
VCFundedGenYer
This will kill most of Facebook.
So many pages link out to other things, including major news sites.
This will either get reverted or Facebook will die. Mark's choice.
insane_dreamer
Is Facebook even relevant anymore?
philipwhiuk
This is to get sites that monetize Facebook as a funnel to pay.
tsunamifury
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.
troyvit
I keep getting this feeling that we're in late-stage capitalism because of how all the oligarchs are maximizing extraction:
* Facebook with this and its new scraping rules for business accounts
* Turning Venezuela into a fiefdom
* Skydance merger
and on and on. But it's not late stage. It's just capitalism and we'll be reading about the same behavior 10 years from now.
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Cort3z
Isn’t this good news? I imagine a lot of misinformation and phishing will become difficult.
noobcoder
this will just kill genuine posting, your favorite pages will stop sharing and your feed will drown in even more AI slop
I barely use fb as it is and this will just drive me off the platform entirely
wg0
This is last stage capitalism of these tech platforms.
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.
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partiallypro
I could understand this for new pages, to crack down on spam, but for established pages? It makes no sense at all. As a cash grab, I get it, but it's not sustainable. Though maybe they are trying to crack down on pages taking over feeds, which I would support...but that would also require them cracking down on the AI slop pictures, etc in feeds.
Is "Metaverse" open web/open protocol? Or just yet another way for Zuckerberg to fuck people over?
rambojohnson
dogshit platform.
micromacrofoot
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.
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superkuh
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.
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dtdynasty
Seems like an anti spam measure. Bad actors ruin all features where links can be placed in front of eyes.
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".
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.
I quit Facebook in 2012. I cannot imagine what's there but in 2019 I had to create a new account to test some development stuff, and checked friends and family and it was pretty much dead.
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”)
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.
Presumably this is an A/B test? I don't see how that's remotely sustainable
archived facebook help page, no trackers: https://nonograph.com/about-links-in-organic-facebook-page-p...
source: https://www.facebook.com/help/1929252614431792
Not just Pages, but I've read this is also coming to any user who at some point in the past clicked the prompt to turn their account into a "pro" one. I did it long ago, just to see what info it would give me; then found little of interest, and forgot about it. Since then people have followed me who didn't friend me. Now, I can revert to a non-pro account (gaining ability to post more than 2 links) but I'd lose all the non-friend followers. Whatever. It's amazing how much junk FB is now. My feed is mostly crap from people/pages I don't follow and have no interest in.
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.
I created a new public group and posted three links from my blog to it in the space of 2 minutes without being charged https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtUvHF02lx4
Therefore "Facebook now charging to post more than 2 links a month" is false. It appears that this is some restriction applied to organic marketing.
Pricing:
Source: https://www.facebook.com/help/1929252614431792The chosen thresholds are a bit absurd — e.g. if it was five rather than two I think authentic users would barely notice — but this actually might be what is needed to make Facebook useful again for people.
The amount of fake link spam, "link in comments" spam, misleading shit, is endless.
No amount of anti-spam technology is going to help. Cold hard cash requirement might do something about it.
If you assume that the only reason to run a fake celebrity page, for example, is to mislead users into some action, this might help there. Though actually what is needed there is a similar price pattern on posting email addresses.
My facebook account was taken over by someone, but the safeguards locked it down. I can't access it. Neither, hopefully, can the bad actor.
I don't miss it, though I feel uncomfortable about the situation. Recovery has not been worth the time involved.
What sucks is that now I can't see a whole ton of local content: local event organizers, small businesses, municipal offices and agencies, community groups, etc. have all consolidated on "facebook" as where every announcement goes.
I hope they continue to make it a more obviously hostile walled garden and that organizations of all kinds move away. The network effect it has may be hard to overcome, however.
Guess it's a tactic to go after bots and scammers?
So is this a kite for one way to commercialize all of Meta's platforms? Or perhaps just a way to kill off a dead business under the guise of a failed experiment?
I really hope this makes business websites great again. And using Google Maps to publish business updates. The number of times I've gone to a business during their open hours only to learn that they're closed and that the update was published to Facebook or Instagram is absurd.
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.
It's an echo chamber, breaking it, allowing sound from the outside to come in has to be expensive because it breaks the main thing it stands for....
Remember from their own mouths the social aspect of the thing is dead... is only the manipulation, and now you can "tune" the interactions with LLMs so you hear exactly what someone pays for you to hear...
Do they even know what H stands for in HTML?
No municipal or public entity should use Facebook as a means of distributing information.
Why not go with Youtube route of force-feeding/shoving ADs in our face for having to share more links?
1. This will force users to keep sharing 2. get more ADs revenue 3. People get fed up and switch to $50/ month plan
similar to how Youtube did. I am fed up and ended up signing upf or youtube premimum.
I want Yellow Pages, not Facebook Pages. And ditch any other form of ad.
>Don't know why we bother with them.
It's very much a bandwagon mentality. "We" is you.
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.
Fun historical note: one of the first applications of the internet was the "world wide web" (WWW). The idea was people that people would host HTML files on the internet that would be connect to each other using "links" to form a web of "sites" (called, of course, "websites"). You can still find these websites on the internet if you leave the walled gardens and paywalls, but it takes some effort.
Almost certainly a way to mitigate bots and spam. Not surprised in the slightest.
I didn't know this and kept sharing links on my new page and it was banned from posting.I tried to look for support but just received responses from bots all the time and no human review until I gave up. I ended up starting another page.
What if i just post a QR code?
Extortionist mafia is getting more extorionist...
EU should just blok meta(fb/inst)/x|twatter/tiktok and rest of usanian BigTech at this point…
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.
Probably an unpopular take, but this is not a bad thing. Maybe weird on it being for link sharing, but it’s always been deeply anticompetitive to offer a free webpage. It’s bad for the market for them to set the price of hosting a webpage for a business at zero, and the network effects make it easier for them to lock businesses in
It has been disincentivising links for quite some time, so more opinions and fluff, fewer quality posts and links to external materials.
I joked to wife about paying for Facebook in 2011.
Monopolies suck.
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.
Curious how this affects the api. Feels like a big breaking change which I’ve heard nothing about.
Those free and open models though
Title isn’t fully accurate. This is specifically for business pages. You can still post links on your own profile or groups.
They just want kill small web and keep people on their platforms.
Simply insane. But honestly if anyone is using Facebook still that's on them. I can't fathom how people still use it.
I mean, this isn't really a surprise. On many social media platforms, you get instantly banned/shadowbanned if you post an external link, if you can publish that post in the first place at all. From the platform's perspective, there is almost no incentive to allow external links (spam, leakage etc). There is no law to mandate that third party links must be allowed.
I don't like this but also don't see how this can be different in the real world.
And I just discovered today that posting a tweet via the X API costs $0.20 if it contains a link. They'll all head this way as they think they're too big to fail.
Rug pull!!!! I love it
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
yep, run a small non-tech business too (new for me) so I got to learn all about 'normie' FB marketing and it's absolutely trash from a business perspective
- we had this link limit for a few months already
- every business portal to upload content etc is super buggy, just shows loading spinners, you never know if a post has worked or not
- we're locked out of our instagram account as we took it over from old owners who don't know password and none of the reset options arrive even though they have access to them
- we finally got an email 2fa to go through to recover the account and that then asked for the SMS too, which never arrives
- there is of course absolutely no way to contact support
Unfortunately it's the only platform all our customers are on. They don't even have Google accounts, it's all WhatsApp, Facebook and phones.
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?
Don't become dependent on these greedy corporations.
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.
Said it before, but this company's product managers are pure evil.
Engineers are enablers at best. If you are not trapped there by visa issues or vesting problems you should take your money and RUN.
You either get stuck into facebook's tight grip on people's perpetual brain rot, or in google/apple's notification gardens. Welcome to the free and open internet.
This will kill most of Facebook.
So many pages link out to other things, including major news sites.
This will either get reverted or Facebook will die. Mark's choice.
Is Facebook even relevant anymore?
This is to get sites that monetize Facebook as a funnel to pay.
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 keep getting this feeling that we're in late-stage capitalism because of how all the oligarchs are maximizing extraction:
* Facebook with this and its new scraping rules for business accounts
* Turning Venezuela into a fiefdom
* Skydance merger
and on and on. But it's not late stage. It's just capitalism and we'll be reading about the same behavior 10 years from now.
Isn’t this good news? I imagine a lot of misinformation and phishing will become difficult.
this will just kill genuine posting, your favorite pages will stop sharing and your feed will drown in even more AI slop
I barely use fb as it is and this will just drive me off the platform entirely
This is last stage capitalism of these tech platforms.
Nothing much left to innovate.
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.
I could understand this for new pages, to crack down on spam, but for established pages? It makes no sense at all. As a cash grab, I get it, but it's not sustainable. Though maybe they are trying to crack down on pages taking over feeds, which I would support...but that would also require them cracking down on the AI slop pictures, etc in feeds.
World Wide Web, huh?
Those hyperlinks ain't free, you know.
So... what
We have the internet and that's not good enough
You already throttle posts - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14147719
You already act as a piss-poor communications medium https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6090712
Is "Metaverse" open web/open protocol? Or just yet another way for Zuckerberg to fuck people over?
dogshit platform.
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.
Seems like an anti spam measure. Bad actors ruin all features where links can be placed in front of eyes.