Facebook Pages require paid subscription to post more than two links per month

I have a friend who is a best-selling author, and her threads account was being heavily throttled (hundreds of likes a few months ago, fewer than ten now) -- it was suggested that it's because she is posting links away from Meta properties, and the way around it was this "link in the comments" tactic.

So it's not necessarily clickbait -- seems to be also an evolved workaround to fight throttling. :-/

Is it so wrong for those who create content to want people to visit their website to consume that content? The alternative being that Facebook and Google summarize everyone's content and keep all the engagement and profit for themselves.

I think some part of this is anti-bot. They don't have a good solution to this yet, I and someone else I know got a lifetime ban from Meta just from opening an account.

No actions / no posts. I guess they determined the way we opened the account was too bot like. Sucks because we're real people that were trying to buy Meta ads.

But maybe doing something like this allows them to ease those restrictions, and then by charging for posts they have an ability to determine bots from non-bots in a more robust way. I'm doubtful it will actually work - because bots are exactly the type of thing that can and will try to open dozens of accounts to get around the 2 posts per month limit.

Yeah I mean it's a problem I'm in groups that just get tons of spam to things off-site that are mainly scams or just fake to get you to view a an ad-ridden page.

People put the link in the comments because Facebook won't let you link to news sites in posts because they can't be posted in certain countries. So, putting the link in the comments was a workaround for that issue.

In today's AI world, it should be trivial for platforms to identify posts using suck tricks. They can simply ask an LLM "Does the following post contain some scummy engagement trick: $POST".

Then downrank them.

If it works for Polygon wouldn't they just pay the subscription?

It is crazy to me that a lot of towns have literally switched to engaging people on FB. Not only are they at mercy of FB, but there are a lot of insane people on FB. Often people who are not even members of the community comment and see those posts. Towns can't delete comments.

I cannot wait until this whole FB trends ends. I want RSS feeds or blogs. Businesses should have their own basic websites that serve their needs.

It is an interesting move, because deploying a viable website has never been easier. FB had an advantage on default reach, but even that is slowly becoming a question as younger generations use it less.

The only challenge now is that those small websites can practically be DDOS'ed by AI crawlers. If not for denial of service, then to rack up hosting bill.

Why is there no GUI desktop app that lets you easily make a website?

[dead]

Facebook is dead among young people, but there are still some dedicated users.

The thing about Facebook is that it's a far more functional social network than the popular alternatives. It's pretty much the go-to for running local community groups.

In the Philippines it's pretty much the center of the community digital life. Government at all levels, local vloggers who get thousands of views even though they are just random people in small towns, groups, marketplace, all incredibly active.

Generally you can't function here without Meta: businesses are either on FB or Instagram (with some on TikTok too), and some people exclusively communicate via Messenger on data only plans where FB data is subsidized by the telco.

It was quite sad when we moved here and had just executed a personal extraction from all Meta properties. When in Rome, I guess.

Its a ghostown, nothing more that our digital footpritn from we were young and wild.

The feed is dead but everything else is very much alive. Pages, events, and marketplace are still used by most people.

Yeah, a couple of months after I graduated in 2015, it was dead, 5 years after that, same as profile images everywhere, nothing changed, immediately abandoned after the forced school interactions lmao

It is 100% just boomers spreading right wing propaganda, scams and spam

"War on hyperlinks"?

I get that Facebook is trying to make some $$$ on them here, but I wasn't aware we had any war (not even a "war on Christmas" fake war) going on against links.

I have some respect for Meta Research for the good they did releasing Torch, FastText vectors, and the LLaMa models among others for free.

How does this work fits with their mission of destroying the fabric of society and the mental well-being of teenagers, I cannot explain.

> These people have arguably contributed nothing to society for over a decade

React, React Native, GraphQL, LLama, PyTorch, RocksDB, Cassandra, folly, Hack, HHVM, OCP, Presto, btrfs, cgroupsv2/PSI, eBPF, zstd, roughly 12% of all Linux kernel contributions are signed off by Meta + Meta is the 5th biggest contributor to Linux kernel.

Also a ton of other projects that did not originally come out of Meta but get a ton of patches and support/funding: MySQL, Memcached, Hadoop, LLVM, Systemd, Rust, Python etc.

Perhaps research a bit more before you make these ignorant comments.

> for very fat salaries

For a fairly sizable portion of the population (especially the tech worker population), salary/TC is seen as the measure of someone's value as a human being. I've had acquaintances who really, sincerely struggled to understand the concept than an engineer making 1/N what an engineer at Meta/Google/etc does could be overall a better engineer. The typical reply has been something along the lines of "but if they're better, why don't they just make more money?"

They really couldn't understand when I tried to explain that, in my experience, nearly all the really brilliant and interesting technical people I knew tended to be making less, because they would rather work on interesting problems with a high degree of control than play leveling games at a large corporation.

> These people have arguably contributed nothing to society for over a decade […] they’re being praised for being the example of best engineers.

React? We can all criticize it, but it has revolutionized the web. Llama. Did you forget what sparked the whole open-weight wave? It was that. I dislike Meta, but I would not criticize the engineers competence. They have done impressive things, check out their blog if you genuinely are curious.

Getting paid half a million TC at Meta beats only making 150k as a DoD contractor.

You’re arguably a war criminal either way, might as well get top dollar.

In a weird way, I'm kind of glad that they're ruining facebook.com.

Like, even in its heyday, it was such an attention trap, and it had very negative effects on the people who got addicted (especially teens).

But the site has gotten so much worse in the past couple years, and its brand is in the garbage. Maybe that's all for the best -- it was never really worth preserving.

> I seriously can’t understand why there’s so much respect for anyone that works at Meta.

Only because the longer you work there, probably the more you've been able to handle while you time there, but I don't really care if you worked at Meta or at Momandpop Software Corp down the road, I care about your personality and ability to learn and adapt, these are stronger signals of the types of devs I want to work with than anything else. I'd still consider you, but I might pass on you if I feel more confident about someone else.

There is a difference between contributing nothing to society and doing more harm than good overall.

The former is just wrong in the case of Meta, you don't need to look far to find many of their contributions. The latter is debatable, but it is not what you said.

There is also a difference between the company as a whole and the people working for it. Their "very fat salaries" can let them support noble causes, or not, they are people, in all their complexity, not just machine parts.

First of all, i don’t know why you are talking about engineers. This is a business decision, not an engineering one.

> I seriously can’t understand why there’s so much respect for anyone that works at Meta.

Is there? Thats new for me.

> yet they’re being praised for being the example of best engineers

Are they? I associate meta with the “move fast and break things” philosophy, not engineering excelence.

I’m sure there are some fine engineers there. But by and large it is just a big company with questionable ethics and lots of money.

> and maybe even made it worse

I don’t think that’s a maybe. There’s actual research on social media addiction. For me, getting off Facebook improved my life.

The salaries aren't based on contribution to society, they are based on contribution to Meta. Fat salaries come from fat contributions.

People working at Meta tend to gravitate around the same group of tech companies who offer the same range of salaries, same selection process, same internal structure. Many of them aren't particularly brillant SWEs (in the sense you don't need to be an elite coder or top PhD), although they can deliver based on the evaluation processes in these companies.

Meta has a bad reputation in some circles, but I don't think there's anything peculiar or particularly evil about them, at least not worse than similar publicly traded big tech companies. They are amoral money-making entities.

That being said I agree that their products suck. I don't use them, besides what's app because it's difficult to avoid. It's also end to end encrypted so it doesn't really matter regarding mass surveillance.

> These people have arguably contributed nothing to society for over a decade

Not as FB. But they have shipped a lot of useful stuff. That doesn't mean the company is suddenly great and all should be forgiven but there is some nuance here.

In addition to all of their open source contributions, their ability to pay a ton of money and fun problems to solve led a lot of fantastic engineers to want to work there — especially before 2015.

I saw the best minds of my generation consumed by Adtech, starving hysterical naked

Okay so one of the reasons I post on Meta platforms less nowadays is that they often don't show my content to my own followers and friends. I'm tired of talking to walls. I'm tired of having communication between friends gatekept by a stupid algorithm. I'm fine with recommendation systems being used for things I DON'T subscribe to, but if it's between friends I want to see ALL of it.

So now it's "pay $50 to post 2 links" but does that guarantee them showing it to your followers and friends? If NOT -- is that sufficient reason for a fraud lawsuit?

And yet Google isn't quite as rebuked. There's another thread on HN today about ads in google TV.

But from a technical perspective, Google breaks constantly. Here's one. On Pixel you could use Assistant to start a timer or open an application. For years. Then Gemini is forced (first opt in, then forced, as is the Google Way)- there's no way to turn off voice out loud response, and opening apps - the most basic thing - doesn't work.

Then you have long-standing headaches like Gmail interface, reports of people's businesses getting blocked on Google Workspace, etc.

Facebook is blamed for that data broker scandal and making us hate our families due to political arguments. Google does all the same data broker stuff, and other than not being a forever scroll social media site, it's morally and technically repugnant.

Because they do Leetcode interview and the day to day work is to solve Leetcode problems.

Now tell me where else can I find such a company having that?

I only care about competitive programming and solve algorithm problem. Nothing else matter: I don't care about product, frontend, security, data pipeline, bla bla nonsense.

And by the way, $400k+ salary in cash and RSU please. No stock options, thank you.

> and yet they’re being praised for being the example of best engineers.

By whom? I haven't seen anyone say something positive about Meta or their employees for at least 15 years, unless you count people who were being paid to write PR articles.

PyTorch .. React ..

That two libraries already build Frontend and AI.

To Meta workers -- and I've known many of you, right up to the c-suite.

If you still work there, you're a garbage human being. It's that simple. You are a POS that deserves no harbor or shelter from any right-thinking tech worker.

(All here have noticed how you no longer highlight your workplace. Apparently shame is useful for something, if not enough.)

There's nothing better about working at Meta than working at Flock or X or Kalshi or Palantir, it's pretty clear that Meta has done far more damage than all 3 combined due to scale. The problem is that many more people on HN have worked at Meta or know someone who has, so coming to terms with that would be painful, so they rather not. It's not too different for people outside tech who pretend to care about these things, but instead of knowing people who work there they're active users of Meta platforms. And I guess the open source contributions give a convenience excuse to techies, as if they make up for even 0.1% of the damage.

This is also why criticism of Meta tends to get a much worse vote ratio in comments on HN than for the other companies I named, lots of people here with direct personal connections to them due to scale.

Meta just added another chapter to their endless list, election interference in Brazil to help Bolsonaro. Just like X.

thank you for saying this. We have to bring back shaming in tech.

Society basically says money = good. God forbid we treat a sex worker with respect but if you're precious little Johnny works at Facebook finding new and exciting ways to get teenagers even more addicted to their phones it's all good because he makes a lot of money and money = good.

Facebook is one of the most successful products of all time. Billions of people use it because they get value out of it. You can raise all of the legitimate criticisms of Facebook that you want, and there are many, but saying they have contributed nothing to society is delusional.

Remember how Sears was a thing but they kept making dumb decisions and were also unable to adapt to new realities? Facebook/Meta is like that. Doomed company walking.

LinkedIn has seriously deranked posts with links in the past. Everything within Meta is heavily A/B tested, but it seems feasible that this will become real.

Instagram already does charge for outgoing links, so I would assume that they found that they can sustainably make money with it there, and that it should work on FB too.

> posted three links from my blog to it

I think the article says you can't post links from your FB page to external sites. What you're describing is the opposite: links from outside FB to an FB page. Of course they don't mind when you bring traffic to FB.

I love that they specified that links in ads do not count

Since links within Meta are free, maybe they are hoping you will bring all the external resources into some Meta property?

Perhaps share QR codes with links. :)

That group will have it's own llama agent to read all those links and tell the members the exact answers to their question so they don't have to leave the safe zone of facebook and go off into the scary internet.

Yep, it will basically mean the death of Facebook. I don’t use it much, but the groups I’m in are for sharing local events (usually link to library page, map for meetup location, etc). Without links, those groups go away.

It's a tactic, the only the latest of many, to go after people who use Facebook to communicate without paying for ads (that is to say - without paying current auction prices for the attention of the recipients of their messages.)

Isn't it funny that every change to "protect users" ends up with you paying Facebook more to reach the people that followed your page?

I still remember when Facebook Pages were promoted as an alternative to feeds and newsletters. You could follow a page and be sure to receive all updates from them. Now you even have to pay to share links.

You can't see it because Zuckerberg in his fucking benevolence has decreed you need an account for PUBLIC LINKS AND POSTS

Never mind the fact his platform has routinely chipped away at privacy in the past, posts suspiciously going from Friends to Friends of Friends or Public. Like you can set it and it will straight up come unset

But it's totally cool to just lock things down for accounts only if you're Facebook, and never mind people get banned all the time for bullshit, horrible things that people report are never taken down, and it's apparently increasingly impossible to even make a new account

Don’t forget the other big fraud vector:

Bot 1: “I have been using the services of Mr Bob John who is a financial advisor, he has made me $70,000 in the past six months. Very trustworthy”

Bot 2: “Oh wow! Will you please share how I can contact him?”

Bot 1: “sure, you can message him on Telegram. His username is BobJohn983739257”

Bot 3: “I have also used Mr Bob John services. He has been a reliable and faithful advisor.”

> The chosen thresholds are a bit absurd

The threshold isn't for your grandpa, it's for Facebook Pages, which are basically landing pages for businesses on Facebook. And I think it's chosen very deliberately: so that you can set up your page for free, promote it, and then realize you need to pay to keep it alive.

The local newspapers are already cooked. Because of what you say, and because Alden Global already owns most of them and has fired 90% of the staff. My hometown paper features about one local story per week now, plus two copy pasted booking reports (I can tell because there’s some kind of encoding error that always eats hyphens, so people’s hyphenated names are always CamelCased instead. They sold their building 10 years ago and now operate out of a small office with about two desks.

> Surveillance capitalists have built a truly miserable internet.

The way I saw it put recently: the internet used to be a library and now it's a store.

Have any of them seriously considered going back to print-only?

Facebook knows what you want to see, because you can follow pages and individuals. They choose to show those scam/bot posts to you anyway. This isn't to fight bots.

Facebook actively courted publishers so they'd post links to their content on their pages. Now they want to charge them for the privilege.

Very few spam/scam posts I see rely on external links. FB is an all in one scammers paradise. This just seems like a transparent attempt to keep people on platform.

This is for Facebook Pages, not for users. Average facebook daily user can keep posting 35 links a day to their favorite slop site.

If it is for that reason and not a money squeezing/enshittification thing, it seems like a big admission their feed algorithm doesn't work.

What about the well funded nation state actors? They'll just buy ad's and keep blasting away.

I think they can afford to pay $50 a month.

That's not what this is though.

If your facebook page were your hosted website, everything's fine and dandy. Cost is still zero!

This move punishes people who do have their own website that they are paying for, and also have a facebook page that links to the main site.

I suffer using it because many people jumped ship from Craigslist to Facebook Marketplace.

Good deals and things can still certainly be found on Craigslist, and there seems to have been a rebound lately in use, but for a while there all that was left on Craigslist was old timers and resellers.

Simplest way for my Mom to keep track of what her extended family is up to and communicate with them. Changing would require all of them moving to a different platform.

and postal money orders.

So you have to pay a small amount of money to keep running your criminal enterprise? This would slightly raise the cost of doing business. Scams and banned goods already account for 10% of "Meta" revenues [1]. This move acknowledges that reality and creates a new rent-seeking behavior around it.

https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...

"how does any independent forum deal with this at scale without banning links?"

By banning spammers and scammers. Facebook opts not to ban scammers, as it's a significant portion of their revenue, and the latest AI slop is very good for engagement.

Venezuela wasn’t working (for its own people) in its previous state either, so it’s pretty hilarious to talk like America is ruining it.

Ask the average citizen there in a couple years, and if they’re not better off than they were under their dictator, I’ll eat crow.

(No real dispute on the other two examples).

Interesting how 9.99 GBP (about 13.36 USD) will allow for "more than 2 links" in 2025, but 14.99 USD now will still only allow for 2 links. Users will need to pay for "advanced plan" at 49.99 USD per month just for 8 links.

https://www.facebook.com/help/1929252614431792/

While it's been longer-lasting than many, social media is a fad and all fads eventually decline. Fundamentally it doesn't do anything that can't be done in a group chat. Thanks to the "forever memory" of the internet, people have learned the risks of posting anything where it will be scraped and preserved for eternity, ready to haunt you when it's most awkward.

Of course they’re not free for Meta, as they allow people to access other sites than Facebook.

> World Wide Web

Embrace, extend, extinguish

They need to introduce postage for messages.

The problem is that it’s the only thing slightly webpage-shaped that is free and extremely easy to make/edit. (Yes, I know that it I’m putting the bar extremely low because it’s an incredibly limiting platform)

You or I could put up an html site and host it on Cloudflare Workers for a total cost of 0 + the domain reg. But mom and pop don’t even know what html is and are too cheap to pay $500 (and some ongoing cost to a local “we build and host your website” firm to do it.

They could probably pay for Squarespace and just tell an AI “here’s a Word doc of my menu, build me a site for my restaurant” but Squarespace just isn’t free.

I don’t know whether to be glad about this because of how horrifying YouTube’s spam problem is, or annoyed because it isn’t helping since their comments are what’s full of rampant fraud spam of every kind.

Honestly, the best thing YouTube could do to help protect users would be to shift to moderated comments only. If the video creator or their designated moderator doesn’t choose to explicitly show a comment, it should go in a black hole. Or even better, offer a service for a small fee relative to your channel’s revenue, which uses a Gemini flash model to approve on-topic comments. Creators can choose to invest either their time or their money, or just have no comments.

I'm not sure a phone number is particularly valuable. It is a decent way pretty much ensure that you aren't a bot, though.

I think this is far too charitable an interpretation. They could just ban spammers. Facebook doesn’t want links going off of their platform because they get paid for people staying on their platform and looking at ads.