It's not a good thing (and will almost certainly be reversed before long), but it's also not very surprising. Unless Dreamwidth has very strong anti-spam measures itself (and it doesn't, see edit...
It's not a good thing (and will almost certainly be reversed before long), but it's also not very surprising. Unless Dreamwidth has very strong anti-spam measures itself (and it doesn't, see edit at bottom), sites like it are the source of a huge amount of spam, because they're effectively free website hosting along with a free new subdomain for each account. So as an external site, just blocking individual Dreamwidth subdomains is almost totally useless, because the spammers constantly have new ones.
Blogspot is quite similar, and when I worked on anti-spam at reddit, it was a continual problem. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out ways to automatically distinguish between spam Blogspot blogs and legitimate ones because—as tempting as it was—I knew blocking the whole domain site-wide wasn't an option. Many individual subreddits do just totally block it because it's almost all spam.
From what I know about Facebook's moderation processes, a lot of the people involved are probably low-paid contractors who only have seconds to decide whether a particular link is spam or not. None of them would be spending hours investigating what Dreamwidth is, looking at legitimate Dreamwidth posts to see how they're different, seeing if there's an API that can be used to get more info about individual Dreamwidth accounts, etc. They just see a reported post, confirm that it's spam, and then there's probably some sort of process that was triggered to automatically block a whole domain if a lot of recent links from that domain have been decided as spam.
I expect it'll probably get unblocked early this week when the "actual" Facebook employees get back to work and they can do the kind of investigation I mentioned.
Edit: from a quick look at Dreamwidth's "latest" page, there's a ton of spam in there. Definitely not surprising it got blocked if they're hosting all that blatant spam.
I have no idea what Dreamwidth is, looks almost like LiveJournal? Not defending Facebook at all because I think they're terrible but I wonder if they've maybe seen a bunch of accounts that are...
I have no idea what Dreamwidth is, looks almost like LiveJournal?
Not defending Facebook at all because I think they're terrible but I wonder if they've maybe seen a bunch of accounts that are promoting conspiracy theories and such and instead of actually dealing with it properly they just applied a blanket ban?
It's not a good thing (and will almost certainly be reversed before long), but it's also not very surprising. Unless Dreamwidth has very strong anti-spam measures itself (and it doesn't, see edit at bottom), sites like it are the source of a huge amount of spam, because they're effectively free website hosting along with a free new subdomain for each account. So as an external site, just blocking individual Dreamwidth subdomains is almost totally useless, because the spammers constantly have new ones.
Blogspot is quite similar, and when I worked on anti-spam at reddit, it was a continual problem. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out ways to automatically distinguish between spam Blogspot blogs and legitimate ones because—as tempting as it was—I knew blocking the whole domain site-wide wasn't an option. Many individual subreddits do just totally block it because it's almost all spam.
From what I know about Facebook's moderation processes, a lot of the people involved are probably low-paid contractors who only have seconds to decide whether a particular link is spam or not. None of them would be spending hours investigating what Dreamwidth is, looking at legitimate Dreamwidth posts to see how they're different, seeing if there's an API that can be used to get more info about individual Dreamwidth accounts, etc. They just see a reported post, confirm that it's spam, and then there's probably some sort of process that was triggered to automatically block a whole domain if a lot of recent links from that domain have been decided as spam.
I expect it'll probably get unblocked early this week when the "actual" Facebook employees get back to work and they can do the kind of investigation I mentioned.
Edit: from a quick look at Dreamwidth's "latest" page, there's a ton of spam in there. Definitely not surprising it got blocked if they're hosting all that blatant spam.
I have no idea what Dreamwidth is, looks almost like LiveJournal?
Not defending Facebook at all because I think they're terrible but I wonder if they've maybe seen a bunch of accounts that are promoting conspiracy theories and such and instead of actually dealing with it properly they just applied a blanket ban?
Discussion at HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23956640
Yeah I don't use it either, but this kind of thing still really pisses me off.
Having many friends at Facebook, they are for the most part very nice people and do not suffer from any mental illnesses that I know of.
Root of the problem right there.