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Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline

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550 points polskibus | 3 comments | 08 Feb 19 16:04 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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jordan801 ◴[08 Feb 19 16:53 UTC] No.19116099[source]▶
Anyone who has written a few scrappers knows how brutally ineffective this is. Yelp tried to pull the same thing and it took me about 3 minutes to rectify my "for fun" scraper. It's also really not that difficult to write a smart scraper that you say, "Look for these things in this post. However you find them, replicate it for the others". Which is ultimately what I made my Yelp scraper do.

If there's a pattern, I will find it, and I will exploit it. <3

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eeeeeeeeeeeee ◴[08 Feb 19 16:56 UTC] No.19116147[source]▶
Yep, seems like a total waste of time. The people scraping will spend the necessary time to get around this (and then distribute that knowledge to the masses) so it seems like a pointless arms race. Facebook employees could better use their time on developing actual features that bring value.
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matz1 ◴[08 Feb 19 17:04 UTC] No.19116250[source]▶
How is this waste of time / pointless ? They do bring value for fb, they reduce the loss of ad money.
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eeeeeeeeeeeee ◴[08 Feb 19 17:17 UTC] No.19116407[source]▶
Because they are fighting the people that absolutely do not want to see advertisements whatsoever (most normal people I know do not have ad-blockers), which already makes them the least likely to be attracted by advertisements. If anything, those brands are souring their reputation anytime they are seen by those kind of people in a medium that those consumers find obnoxious.

You can make a similar argument that the RIAA/MPAA going after piracy is a waste of time. Again, focus on delivering value to actual customers.

If Facebook spent more time on making a friendly ecosystem / community I would be more open to signing back up again. Instead, it seems they are hyper-focused on advertisements at the expense of everything else.

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1. rchaud ◴[08 Feb 19 18:13 UTC] No.19117030[source]▶
"Delivering value to customers"? It's a website-cum-message board. There is no further value to deliver via software features; all of that work is going towards meeting the needs of advertisers.

And advertisers are asking them to show what they are doing to combat adblocking. FB isn't doing this to target customers least likely to convert, they're doing it to check a box for their ad sales team.

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2. otabdeveloper2 ◴[08 Feb 19 19:21 UTC] No.19117717[source]▶
Newsflash: Facebook's customers are advertisers, not the honeypot victims stuck to their site.
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3. tomatocracy ◴[08 Feb 19 20:22 UTC] No.19118286[source]▶
But there’s a trade off. Fewer ads better placed means fewer people likely to block them and more people likely to actually look at them instead of skim past. It’s also likely that the people who were blocking ads are less likely to click on them and thus (for some advertisers) lower value impressions anyway.

Revenue is (simplistically) the product of impressions and value per impression. It’s not therefore immediately obvious that moves like this actually do increase revenue for them, especially over the long term since one potential side effect of doing this is giving more ammunition to the ‘delete Facebook’ crowd.