HN Explorer

Linking to distrowatch.com from Facebook is a community violation

27 points by dcanelhas ↗ HN
Post that got taken down for violating community guidelines was simply the following:

"Det finns många bra alternativ förutom ubuntu. Kolla på distrowatch.com och titta runt lite, kolla på screenshots och besök hemsidorna se om det är något verkar passa dig. Många distros satsar just på att vara "lightweight" och vissa har ett "live medium" vilket innebär att installationsmediumet är så att du kan starta operativsystemet direkt från ett USB minne och testa det utan att ens installera det till en början."

in english:

"There are many good options besides ubuntu. Check out distrowatch.com and look around a bit, look at the screenshots and visit the websites to see if there is something that seems to suit you. Many distros focus on being "lightweight" and some have a "live medium" which means that the installation medium is so that you can boot the operating system directly from a USB memory and test it without even installing it in the first place."

14 comments

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boomboomsubban
I'm not doubting that this happened, but it seems like it must be some strange mistake or was an act of moderation by whatever community you posted this in.

Facebook specifically targeting distrowatch would be the most absurdly petty use of Facebook's resources. Have you tried linking to distrowatch elsewhere?

hdjjhhvvhga
Of course it's a mistake, that's why it's good it ended up on FB - some of the folks there will read it and fix it, hopefully within a couple of hours. There is no other, official way of dealing with this kind of abuse on their part (apart from clicking "I disagree" which means nothing if you are a single person, and the process is not transparent anyway), so HN/tweets with high-profile accounts seem the only option.
bopolissimus2
as I write this, your post was 13 hours ago. It is now 8:15PM in California and this is still happening.

It could be a mistake, sure. And maybe they need 24 hours to have changes roll through their servers.

FB being FB though, I'll assume evil before I assume incompetence.

bopolissimus2
Heh, and sending "testing: distrowatch.com" in FB messenger is also blocked.
hdjjhhvvhga
Well, it's still there. It means this post didn't get enough upvotes on HN and they won't unblock the URL. Shame.
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thih9
Is there more context?

Who made the post, when was it taken down, has it been appealed, was there any response, are other users also affected, etc?

hdjjhhvvhga
No context is needed. Just try to share on FB any text containing the string distrowatch.com and see what happens.
dcanelhas
I made the post on October 7th, 2021 as a comment. The comment was a response to a post made by a friend who was asking for information about Ubuntu in the context of wanting to get some additional mileage out of an old laptop.

The post is flagged as "breaking our community rules regarding spam". There is no way to appeal this as far as I can tell.

haunter
Touche that you are complaining on a site which has one of the strictest content policy and removes a lot of things w/o any sort of notice or appeal

Otherwise what's the context, Facebook bad?

hdjjhhvvhga
It's very strange, but it's true, I've just tried it by sharing the provided text. It looks like Facebook considers distrowatch.com spam.
dezb
facebook are morons ;-)