John Gruber advocates strongly for the open web and defends fundamental digital freedoms against corporate control, specifically criticizing Facebook's walled-garden architecture that blocks search engine indexing and Internet Archive access. The article aligns with UDHR protections for freedom of expression, access to information, and cultural participation, positioning open web infrastructure as essential to human rights in the digital age.
Amen. There are dozens of very good reasons for righteous anger toward Facebook, and only a handful are in this article. But just those are enough. And enough is enough.
Not everything on the internet needs to be public (or part of the "open web" as the article calls it). Facebook is a fantastic place for web content that isn't meant to be public.
This idea of posting "public content" on Facebook is inherently flawed. I agree with the article on that much.
However, what I haven't figured out yet is if this is actually an evil-Facebook issue or just a user issue. Is Facebook actively encouraging this web breaking behaviour or is it a "mis-use" of what the tool originally intended (e.g., a safe place to post content/blog/etc. with privacy restrictions)?
I have a feeling that Facebook will be on the decline. My teenagers and early-20 year-olds and their friends (not just local, but all over the US) think Facebook is for old people. I actually heard a 16 year old recently giving a speech where he mentioned Snapchat Stories, then, as an aside, said, "That's like Facebook or Pintrest for you old people."
You've ever been to one of those pages that embed Facebook's comment engine? Yeah, those are the worst. I did some analysis on a random page with just three Facebook comments. Requests to Facebook's servers accounted for 1.5 MB of the 2.4 MB tranfered by the ENTIRE page. 87 network requests, 35 javascript files injected and it didn't even load all the comments! (I had to click on a "Load more comments" button to load the rest of the comments.)
Why the hell do you need 37 javascript files and 1.5 MB to load three comments?
(Shameless plug to my own open source, lightweight and tracking-free comment engine alternative to Facebook, Disqus and the rest: https://github.com/adtac/commento)
I deactivated my Facebook account several months ago, and it's been about 90% great, 10% frustrating. It's great for all the obvious reasons (less timesuck, less compulsion to endlessly scroll your life away, no notification interruptions).
The frustrations are real, though. Primarily it's around events and photos. There are some communities I participate in that regularly organize events through Facebook, and now I don't really get invited to those anymore. It's also harder to organize events where you casually invite people you don't know as well.
It's also occasionally annoying not being able to dig up a certain photo you wanted for reference. Even if you have a copy of the photo somewhere, if you don't have it hosted online then you can't really bring it up to show it to someone.
Still, frustrations aside, it's 90% great, and I recommend everyone try it for themselves.
All this open-web bitching sounds oddly familiar from back when AOL was a tech monstrosity with nearly everything inside its walled-garden. Facebook is basically just a worldwide version of AOL, and plenty of people are tiring of it, just as they tired of AOL's dialup shenanigans and obnoxious floppy disk marketing.
And Facebook, too, will eventually crust away when the underlying tech improves (universal 5G? who knows?) and the next Steve Case / Mark Zuckerberg visionary builds the next generally-centralized service for most internet users. But the open web will survive just fine.
ah a "Why FB is evil" article, here come the slew of HN'ers to proclaim their deletion of FB years ago. I myself have no issues with the social network, I keep up with friends, family and it isn't a time suck for me anymore than HN.
I'm no Facebook fanboy but this article feels like a "why does my square peg not fit into their round hole" type of complaint. Facebook is a social network, not a public blogging platform.
Here is my interpretation of the complaints. Please point out what I am missing.
>It's impractical...
Square peg round hole.
>It's supporting their downgrading and killing the web...
Facebook posts being inherently (mostly) simple text is 'killing the web'? I don't buy it.
>Facebook might go out of business.
Just a generic SaaS complaint. Nothing unique to Facebook about this.
The open web is an attack on the average user. It's unremittingly hostile as a place to go to if you aren't part of the culture that spawned it. Facebook does a very poor job of sheltering people from the worst of the open web, but it's about a billion times more bearable than the open web scaled up to modern adoption rates would be.
I posted this comment a few weeks ago, but this seems super relevant to extend the author's point. I agree that Facebook is a walled garden. But in the developed world, Facebook is just part of the internet that people use. However, in some parts of the developing world, Facebook is the only internet people use.
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Facebook's dominance is even more pronounced in parts of the developing world. I've met people in Asia (Myanmar and Nepal) who have just accessed the internet for the first time in the past 12-24 months (through their Android smartphones).
But they don't know the true internet - they only know the internet through the Facebook app. They use it like we use Google and web browsers.
To them, Facebook is the internet. They don't have email accounts. They don't use the browser. They don't search the web. I met someone in a small town who never even used the maps feature. I tried to think of what value the true internet might bring them, but when I suggested that "you can search for news and read other things", the response was that they already did that with the Facebook App.
One guy handed me his phone, so I could add myself as a friend on his Facebook. While I started typing my name, I noticed his search history... and to him, Facebook was even a substitute for what people in the USA might use Incognito mode for!
I would call Facebook their internet portal, but it's not really a portal to anything - Facebook is just the entire internet to them.
“Nobody asks, they don’t care about the email,” he said, explaining that most don’t know that creating an email address is free, and easy. “No one is using that. They have Facebook.”
Reminder to self that I should put in my LICENSE files:
Copyright (c) <year> <copyright holders>
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person ...
(the usual stuff, followed by ...)
It is the express wish of the author that this software shall not be used in derived products or services to collect or spread information about users against their will for any purpose other than the main functionality of the product or service. Users will need to explicitly "opt-in" to such use of information if desired. The functionality of the derived product or service should be sufficiently broken down to avoid an all-or-nothing proposition to the user.
Suggestions for extensions and/or better phrasing welcome.
The rationale is that, while this will not have meaning or uphold in a court of law, the least we can do as developers is to send a message of our disapproval for the way big companies are treating the web and its users.
I'm in a small minority of people who want to pay money to get on FB and can't.
I've been trying for months to advertise on there but there's no such thing as a business-only FB acct, you need an organic personal account. And some combination of my activity (not friending anyone, not using FB for anything, using an incognito tab, my IP address? I don't know) looks like trouble to the powers that be so my account keeps getting shut off.
I hate them just as much as these other guys but for 2x the reasons.
By altering the title, you've taken something deliberately strong and watered it down. This isn't a situation where a different title better conveys the authors intent or content...this is explicitly an opinionated essay expressing exactly what the title summarizes. It is unnecessary censorship. Sure it is a word that commonly is considered vulgar, but it is also a word that has significant visceral meaning. HN shouldn't censor words just because they're strong enough to be offensive.
Facebook is an attack on society itself. Ignorance of other people's stupidity, bigotry, and pettiness is a necessary lubricant for society to function.
Whenever I see Gruber talking about openess and standards I smell hipocrysy - same way we can say iOS ecosystem is an attack on open computing (walled garden).
They've been openly attacking the open web since day one. I think the problem now is that they've been too successful.
Zuckerberg was on to something. He saw the web connecting pages, but not people. So he created a web connecting people and now it has grown to what it is. With both MySpace and Google+ practically buried, Facebook has no competition.
We desperately need an alternative, and not just one for the sake of not being facebook, but something that works. The open web needs a way to connect people.
I tried deleting Facebook once, but I've got family there and ... the big problem is that I haven't gotten my time spent online back.
I'm on Twitter, I'm on Hacker News, I'm on Reddit, I'm on Gitter, I send/receive dirty jokes on WhatsApp, etc. Plenty of opportunity to waste time, no need for FB to be in the picture at all. I've been composing this stupid message for the past 5 minutes.
But I'm using Facebook less and less. For me the "open web" is a necessity, not a moral high ground or anything like that. I don't like opening Facebook blog posts because Facebook sucks for blog posts. TFA mentions the Internet Archive or Google not indexing articles. Hell yeah, those are really good concerns.
Also, forget the open web ... how about the fact that if you give them permissions to access your photos, on iOS at least, they are uploading your photos to their services for making photo collages, without you explicitly allowing this.
I know this because I opened the app a week ago and I was proposed a collage with animated transitions and music in the background, titled "Your Sunday evening in Bucharest", that couldn't have been processed on my phone - especially since iOS restricts background activity, plus it would be pretty bad for battery life.
And I freaked out, so now Facebook is gone from my phone. Article mentions an all out assault on the open web. Sure, but it's also an all out assault on people's privacy.
I was 7 when Ceaușescu was shot and communism fell in 1989 and before that paranoia was at an all times high. People were afraid for example that their phones were tapped and that their neighbours were listening. Which was in fact true, but oh boy, that's nothing compared with what happens today.
Look, there's no dispute that Facebook is an assault on the 'open web' because it's a walled garden where the data only flows in. In fact, on the HN thread for Gruber's previous post about Google's AMP, I defended [1] some aspects of AMP because at least it tries to be distributed vs. Facebook, and in that post I echo much of what Gruber would later say.
But sadly, today's so-called 'open web' is just as much of an assault on the open web: trackers, cookies, and cross-correlated advertisements follow the user everywhere; every new link is literally a crapshoot which may execute arbitrary code placed there by the webmaster or their delegates. It's the devil you know vs. the devil that's brand-new every time: do I want my browsing habits aggregated to help them better target ads and content for me inside some walled garden, or do I want my browsing habits across the 'open web' to be aggregated by a dozen third parties to help them better target ads for me on the outside, while I blissfully extoll the virtues of decentralization and pretend I'm better off?
Until recently, the only way to avoid this was to spin off a clean incognito session in a browser running only one window, then close it after every pageview. Who does that? Short of a very particular few, no one.
The web is a wonderful, versatile medium of referencible documents and multimedia that we've turned into an application delivery platform; and the one thing that content silos like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Apple News get right is that not everyone cares to visit unvetted content solely judged by its URL.
Before FB, my email was clogged with trivial crap that family members and aquaintances forwarded to everyone in their address book, including me. Now that never happens. Based on everyone else's complaints, it sounds like that stuff has moved to FB leaving my inbox a much more useful place.
I've enjoyed roughly the same experience but without the downsides.
As far as events go, the neckbeard in me hasn't actually minded. I still get invited to "high quality" events (things my real-life friends are going to) and haven't really missed the lower quality events.
Photos I just conveniently had solved by having all my photos on Google Photos anyways (I stopped trusting offline storage long ago).
I think my Facebook account is reactivated at the moment (due to logging in to search for something) but I disabled notification when I'd originally left and haven't looked back. Life's easier (and way more productive) without the Book.
Interestingly, I still find a lot of value in Messenger. But they've split concerns so you can use that without reactivating your FB account.
However, what I haven't figured out yet is if this is actually an evil-Facebook issue or just a user issue.
I have a side rant that has been bubbling in me for a long time on this issue. My city's alternative weekly paper, The Dallas Observer, switched from Livefyre to Facebook's commenting system about two years ago. Livefyre was bad but the Facebook comment system is worse. With Facebook forcing "real" people accounts, comments plummeted on stories that presented alternate takes on local stories that didn't fall into line with the Dallas Morning News's traditional power structure patriarchs (mostly land developers).
The editor's suggestion to people that wanted to comment on a story without using their "real name" was to create a separate Facebook account. Un-fucking real.
My conspiracy theory is that The Dallas Observer, and probably all Village Voice Media properties, were promised better exposure in Facebook user's news feeds if they used the Facebook comment engine. Seems like a devil's bargain to me.
I put the Facebook comment system squarely in the evil-Facebook pile.
Not to hard to understand, i think, its bureaucracy, incremental changes and not dealing with the technical debt from the changes, having a farm of coders that just need to check off the that requirements were met.
Now add a continuous stream of revenue and the only people that notice or care are technically oriented people.
> Not everything on the internet needs to be public (or part of the "open web" as the article calls it).
Indeed, and since the beginning of the web there have been ways to create private content. The old-fashioned solutions give real control to the user.
> Facebook is a fantastic place for web content that isn't meant to be public.
Not really, because: a) you have no control over the platform -- the notion of private can change on a FB's whim and there is nothing you can do -- and b) you have no control over whom your content actually reaches, FB's opaque algorithm does.
> Is Facebook actively encouraging this web breaking behaviour or is it a "mis-use" of what the tool originally intended
Can you remember FB ever complaining that people should use the open web for some of the stuff that goes on in there? I don't mean to offend you, but I would say that you have to be a bit naive to believe that they do not desire to turn the web into a walled garden under their complete control.
I started thinking of FB more as a channel to publish notifications of content I keep on other sites, like blog entries, Flickr photos, etc. Once I started thinking of it as more of a pub/sub layer for the content I manage externally, I felt better about staying on it.
Nope. Like you, I'm no fanboy (more an active hater), but this article seems like a general sense of unease about Facebook wrapped into a stream-of-consciousness argument.
No ads, no political spam, no viral garbage, no pictures of what your friend ate for dinner, no psychologically manipulative algorithms. Just people talking to their friends and posting pictures of themselves hanging out.
If someone made a new social network like that, I'd sign up today.
Can't you just have Facebook and only use it for the events/photos? I've got a Facebook but never use it for posting/looking at other people's posts. Every now and then I'll get an invitation to an event which is really all I use it for.
And contrarians who revel in their "I'm not snobbish like you all" Regular Joe aura. At least the ones who talk about why they quit stick to their own experiences rather than belittling others who still find value in it.
Yes, you are. The argument is that facebook has become something that causes the rest of the web to be worse off. Less open, more bloated, more central.
Aside from the bureaucratic inertia that all large groups ultimately accumulate have you ever thought that this is by design? Facebook investing resources into really polishing and optimizing the web experience of comments doesn't really get people to use Facebook more. What they really want is for you to post your content, comment on it, and share it all from within the Facebook, and ideally from a highly-optimized Facebook app they completely control.
Facebook Comments aren't designed to be a great experience. They're designed to funnel users into Facebook's ecosystem and to get them to use Facebook more. It's a marketing tool for Facebook.
Oh god, the shit where incredibly overweight pages make you click the slow "load more" buttons just to load a few more kb of text that could've been immediately shown to you for basically no extra cost drives me crazy.
And as much as facebook sucks, most web sites suck. It's amazing to me how many sites I read on my phone are basically unusable until I fall back on Safari's reader mode.
Javascript handlers that fuck up scrolling speed, tons of popups obscuring the content, just all kinds of shit. It's like the last thing the website wants you to do is actually read it. (This is probably true, from some sort of limited penny-wise, pound-foolish ad-driven perspective.)
Tangentially related: I don't mind the bells and whistles (such as bloated commenting systems) on desktop where my machine has resources to waste, but I wish more news sites made available a bare-bones, text-only version of their web site for browsing on mobile (e.g., http://thin.npr.org/).
Probably not a good idea. If you include vaguely-worded restrictions like that in your license you're 1) using a non-standard license, and 2) breaking Freedom 0 of GNU's Free Software Definition.
Personally I feel that it'd be better to put that sort of statement in the README; especially if you're not concerned with whether its legally-enforceable or not.
Yes, I don't understand why the web needs to be "open" per the original post for it to be deemed good. If FB wasn't a nasty platform and simply didn't let Google index (mooch and profit from) its content, that would be fair in my opinion. Why should I start a company and then give that content away for free to Google to profit from? It's not like Google is performing some altruistic public service. Neither is DuckDuckGo, or any other company.
FB is horrible because it nurtures psychological pathology, not because it's not open. Everything you need to know about FB can be summarized from Zuck's generous offer to let employees freeze their eggs so that instead of having kids and leading normal lives they can work for him. Dude is gross, and so is his platform.
> Facebook posts being inherently (mostly) simple text is 'killing the web'? I don't buy it.
It's also misleading. If you want something more like a blog, then use notes instead of posts. The notes editing interface is actually better than most blog platforms, and IMO the results look just as pretty too. Then your notes appear in your timeline, searchable (within Facebook), with comments, etc. Is it everything an "open web" activist could want? No, but it's sure not just plain text.
BTW, I can't help but shake my head at people (like Gruber) who say Facebook is evil but also think absolutely everything should be searchable and monetizable by Google. That's just not logically consistent.
It's incredibly obnoxious - the first time my dad showed me I couldn't believe how much space it took up. He has no interest in joining Facebook but his friend promotes his business via pictures on there
iOS apps being a walled garden doesn't really have anything to do with the open web. Apple has long embraced the open web, so there's nothing hypocritical about this.
I agree that Gruber is leaning a lot towards Cupertino, but when it comes to open Web standards he's always been praising Google's approaches and had critics for Apple's Safari and WebKit approach.
Let's not start pointing fingers about being hypocritical, tho, otherwise I would really hear for example how exactly is Google stance on openness not hypocritical.
(I know you didn't name Google directly, but it's the easiest example)
And why would "learning a culture" before getting to be a part of it be any bad? Why should we be entitled to a free pass to some place that needs a culture to be grasped?
This is exactly facebook problem: lowering the bar is not a good thing per se, especially if you then pretend to run away from the responsibilities that come with it (i.e. being a fucking awesome amplifier for the worst shit ever)
Totally agree. Especially if the expression of such ignorance comes with a sense of pride and entitlement. It's easy to get entitled and proud, because nobody in real life would give you 200 nods to your racist musings while in line at Walmart. But 200 people press a stupid like button, and suddenly you feel like your idiotic and uneducated opinion has a great meaning.
This is straightforward dangerous for representative democracies, which are founded on the subtle concept of an elite of better people that have a mandate to lead society.
The fact that this mandate has been misused so many times is no excuse to suddenly drop all the good that comes from having someone who knows more in a position of power.
I believe the main issue is that people use facebook as if it were the open web. People aren't posting because they want to keep their content in a silo, but rather because they don't know of / have an alternative publishing vector.
Nobody is saying don't have private silos, but I believe Gruber and co are saying don't pretend like a private silo is public, when it isn't.
What does an alternative look like that does not eventually lead to another Facebook? I've seen decentralized platforms, platforms that do not sell your data or target you with ads - how are they sustainable?
Article's core thesis: advocates for search engine indexing, Internet Archive access, and unrestricted information discovery. Criticizes Facebook for blocking 'search engines from indexing Facebook posts' and forbidding 'The Internet Archive from saving copies.'
FW Ratio: 57%
Observable Facts
The article explicitly states 'Facebook forbids search engines from indexing Facebook posts.'
The article states 'The only way to find Facebook posts is through Facebook,' blocking open discovery.
The article criticizes 'Facebook forbids The Internet Archive from saving copies of posts,' explicitly limiting information preservation.
Daring Fireball content is searchable by Google, DuckDuckGo, and Bing; archivable by Internet Archive; and permanently discoverable.
Inferences
The author identifies search engine indexing and Internet Archive access as core to 'access to information' under Article 19.
The article frames Facebook's blocking of these services as directly contrary to freedom of information and expression.
The structural contrast between Facebook's closed model and Daring Fireball's open model demonstrates explicit commitment to information freedom.
Article advocates for human dignity in digital spaces by defending open web infrastructure as foundational to freedom and access. Frames Facebook's walled garden as antithetical to human rights principles.
FW Ratio: 60%
Observable Facts
The article states 'Facebook is designed from the ground up as an all-out attack on the open web.'
The author advocates for 'the open web' and criticizes 'walled garden' design as incompatible with fundamental digital access.
Daring Fireball publishes on an open platform without paywalls, registration requirements, or access barriers.
Inferences
The author frames digital freedom and accessibility as fundamental to human dignity in the information age.
The article's defense of open web infrastructure reflects commitment to principles that benefit all people equally.
Article advocates for unrestricted information access enabling free thought and conscience. Criticizes Facebook for restricting 'freedom' through walled-garden design that limits content expression.
FW Ratio: 60%
Observable Facts
The article advocates for 'the open web' as foundational to freedom, stating 'Your post sucks because it doesn't contain links, styling, and you can't enclose a podcast if you want.'
The author frames open publishing as essential: 'If you want something to be publicly accessible, post it to a real blog on any platform that embraces the real web.'
Daring Fireball content is freely accessible to all visitors regardless of ideology, affiliation, or belief.
Inferences
The author frames open web infrastructure as essential to free thought and conscience.
The advocacy for open publishing supports freedom of belief and unrestricted intellectual access.
Article defends right to cultural expression and creativity. Criticizes Facebook for limiting creative expression: 'Your post sucks because it doesn't contain links, styling, and you can't enclose a podcast if you want.' Advocates for open platforms enabling full cultural participation.
FW Ratio: 60%
Observable Facts
The article states 'Your post sucks because it doesn't contain links, styling, and you can't enclose a podcast if you want,' criticizing limits on cultural expression.
The author advocates 'post it to a real blog on any platform that embraces the real web,' supporting cultural participation.
Daring Fireball supports links, styling, media, and full creative expression.
Inferences
The author defends right to cultural expression and creativity outside corporate-controlled platforms.
The advocacy for open platforms reflects commitment to cultural participation and creation.
Article describes how Facebook's design creates unequal access experiences: 'a full one-third of my window is covered by a pop-over trying to get me to sign in.' Advocates for equal accessibility.
FW Ratio: 60%
Observable Facts
The article describes Facebook's barrier to non-users: 'a full one-third of my window is covered by a pop-over trying to get me to sign in or sign up.'
The author states 'I refuse to link to anything on Facebook either, for the same reasons as Dave' — citing access barriers.
Daring Fireball is freely accessible to all readers without account requirements.
Inferences
The author argues that Facebook's design creates unequal access experiences depending on user status, violating equal accessibility.
The criticism of these barriers reflects advocacy for Article 1 principles of universal, equal rights.
Article discusses privacy barriers and user control over visibility of content. Criticizes Facebook's privacy model that conceals content based on access status.
FW Ratio: 60%
Observable Facts
The article discusses 'privacy settings' and barriers: 'I don't know what your privacy settings are. So if I point to your post, it's possible a lot of people might not be able to read it.'
The author experiences privacy-based access barriers when viewing Facebook as a non-user.
Daring Fireball site has no visible tracking mechanisms, ad networks, or privacy-invasive data collection patterns.
Inferences
The author's concern about privacy settings and content visibility reflects interest in protecting user privacy and control.
The site's clean design and minimal tracking suggests structural respect for visitor privacy rights.
Article advocates for discoverable, accessible educational content through search engines and archives. Criticizes Facebook for blocking search indexing which prevents educational access.
FW Ratio: 60%
Observable Facts
The article criticizes 'not accessible to search engines,' limiting educational discovery.
The author emphasizes searchability: 'Search for "Marc Haynes Roger Moore" on any major search engine' to find content.
Daring Fireball functions as freely-accessible educational resource on open web.
Inferences
The author's advocacy for search-enabled, discoverable content reflects commitment to information access for education.
The structure of Daring Fireball as a searchable, archivable resource supports Article 26 educational rights.
Article discusses control over published content and concerns about permanent access and preservation. Criticizes Facebook's barriers to Internet Archive as limiting lasting ownership.
FW Ratio: 60%
Observable Facts
The article states 'Facebook might go out of business... Facebook might alter the deal, blocking public access in the future to a post that today is publicly visible.'
The article criticizes 'Facebook forbids The Internet Archive from saving copies of posts,' blocking preservation.
Daring Fireball content has permanent URLs and is actively preserved in Internet Archive.
Inferences
The author values lasting control over published content, treating it as a property-like asset.
The critique of Internet Archive blocking reflects concern for protecting information as a durable, lasting resource.
Article expresses personal duty and community responsibility to protect web integrity. Author states personal practice: 'I refuse to link to anything on Facebook' to preserve open web.
FW Ratio: 67%
Observable Facts
The article states personal duty: 'I refuse to link to anything on Facebook either, for the same reasons as Dave.'
The author expresses community concern: 'I'm sorry no matter how good your idea is fuck you I won't help you and Facebook kill the open web.'
Inferences
The author frames personal responsibility to web community as central to protecting digital rights and freedoms.
Article criticizes corporate actions that undermine information rights and preservation. Advocates against 'destruction' of archiving and access rights by Facebook.
FW Ratio: 67%
Observable Facts
The article criticizes 'Facebook forbids The Internet Archive from saving copies of posts,' blocking preservation rights.
The author frames Archive blocking as hostile to 'anyone who cares about the longevity of the stuff they link to.'
Inferences
The article advocates against corporate destruction of information preservation and archiving rights.
Article advocates for equitable participation in digital publishing and content creation through open platforms, rather than corporate-controlled services.
FW Ratio: 67%
Observable Facts
The article advocates 'post it to a real blog on any platform that embraces the real web,' enabling economic participation.
The author discusses publishing and content creation as participation in digital economy.
Inferences
The advocacy for open platforms reflects concern for equitable economic and social participation in digital infrastructure.
Article describes Facebook's design barriers without explicitly framing them as discrimination. Focus is on technical access rather than protected-class discrimination.
FW Ratio: 67%
Observable Facts
The article describes unequal treatment by Facebook but does not use the language of protected-class discrimination.
Daring Fireball site content is equally accessible to all visitors without regard to any personal characteristics.
Inferences
While the article identifies unequal treatment, it does not explicitly address discrimination as understood under Article 2 (protected classes).
Article criticizes Facebook's control over digital assembly and collective action. Characterizes platform as 'hostile to users' and limiting freedom to associate around shared content.
FW Ratio: 67%
Observable Facts
The article characterizes Facebook as 'hostile to users with pop-overs' and describes restrictive design.
The author refuses to participate in Facebook's model: 'I refuse to link to anything on Facebook either.'
Inferences
The criticism of Facebook's control mechanisms reflects concern for Article 20 freedoms of assembly and association.
Daring Fireball is fully searchable on major search engines and archivable by Internet Archive, embodying Article 19 principles through open-web infrastructure.
Daring Fireball demonstrates respect for visitor privacy through minimal tracking, no aggressive profiling, and clean design without privacy-invasive mechanisms.
Daring Fireball is fully accessible to all visitors, supporting diverse thought without restriction. Content is freely viewable without ideological gatekeeping.
Daring Fireball's publishing platform embodies open web values through searchable, archivable, freely-accessible content with no barriers or hostile design patterns.
Daring Fireball site is equally accessible to all visitors regardless of affiliation, account status, or identity, demonstrating non-discriminatory access.
Evaluated by claude-haiku-4-5-20251001: +0.43 (Moderate positive)
2026-02-28 01:41
dlq
Dead-lettered after 1 attempts: Facebook is an attack on the open web
--
2026-02-28 01:40
dlq
Dead-lettered after 1 attempts: Facebook is an attack on the open web
--
2026-02-28 01:39
rate_limit
OpenRouter rate limited (429) model=llama-3.3-70b
--
2026-02-28 01:39
eval_retry
OpenRouter error 400 model=llama-3.3-70b
--
2026-02-28 01:39
eval_failure
Evaluation failed: Error: OpenRouter API error 400: {"error":{"message":"Provider returned error","code":400,"metadata":{"raw":"{\"details\":{\"_errors\":[\"response_format is not supported by this model\"]},\"issues\":
--
2026-02-28 01:38
rate_limit
OpenRouter rate limited (429) model=llama-3.3-70b
--
2026-02-28 01:38
rate_limit
OpenRouter rate limited (429) model=llama-3.3-70b
--
2026-02-28 01:36
rate_limit
OpenRouter rate limited (429) model=llama-3.3-70b
--
2026-02-28 01:36
rate_limit
OpenRouter rate limited (429) model=llama-3.3-70b
--
2026-02-28 01:36
dlq_replay
DLQ message 97652 replayed to LLAMA_QUEUE: Facebook is an attack on the open web
--
2026-02-28 01:36
dlq_replay
DLQ message 97631 replayed to LLAMA_QUEUE: Facebook is an attack on the open web
--
2026-02-28 00:18
eval_success
Light evaluated: Strong positive (0.80)
--
2026-02-28 00:18
eval
Evaluated by llama-3.3-70b-wai: +0.80 (Strong positive)
2026-02-27 20:22
dlq
Dead-lettered after 1 attempts: Facebook is an attack on the open web
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2026-02-27 20:19
rate_limit
OpenRouter rate limited (429) model=llama-3.3-70b
--
2026-02-27 20:18
rate_limit
OpenRouter rate limited (429) model=llama-3.3-70b
--
2026-02-27 20:17
rate_limit
OpenRouter rate limited (429) model=llama-3.3-70b
--
2026-02-27 20:06
dlq
Dead-lettered after 1 attempts: Facebook is an attack on the open web
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2026-02-27 20:04
rate_limit
OpenRouter rate limited (429) model=llama-3.3-70b
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2026-02-27 20:03
eval_failure
Evaluation failed: Error: OpenRouter API error 402: {"error":{"message":"Provider returned error","code":402,"metadata":{"raw":"{\"error\":\"API key USD spend limit exceeded. Your account may still have USD balance, but
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2026-02-27 16:19
eval
Evaluated by llama-4-scout-wai: +0.80 (Strong positive)
2026-02-27 13:15
eval
Evaluated by deepseek-v3.2: +0.52 (Moderate positive) 10,023 tokens
2026-02-27 12:51
eval
Evaluated by claude-haiku-4-5: +0.71 (Strong positive)