Facebook Unsocial Reader

wrote the same thing when they first released social reader (it has been here on HN):<p><a href="http://github.com/nikcub/frictionless" rel="nofollow">http://github.com/nikcub/frictionless</a><p>the problem is that they change the HTML elements every few days and it is a pain to keep up with it. I am in the middle of rewriting frictionless to use an external ruleset which will be updated, not requiring the extension to be updated.<p>you can see what we go through to get this to work consistently across loggedin/loggedout users, all the different apps (what you do wont work for all apps) and all the different use cases:<p><a href="https://github.com/nikcub/frictionless/blob/master/webkit/frictionless.safariextension/chrome/content.js" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/nikcub/frictionless/blob/master/webkit/fr...</a><p>(we also anonymize referral and click data)<p>Edit: to add, i'd be more than happy to merge the efforts and we are definitely seeking contributors. would rather one extension that works all the time than two that don't. we have already put in a lot of time keeping this extension up-to-date since launch with all the changes and updates made by the social readers.

Has no one noticed that you can set permissions to the app posts. You can set it to visible to <i>only yourself</i> at the time of installation.

I understand philosophers like Sarte and Kant would agree that the moral thing to do here is not use a plug-in that lets us nerds cheerily use links generated by an evil feature without harming ourselves (by auto-sharing what <i>we</i> read), but rather choose <i>not to follow such links</i> and to <i>warn our often-unwitting friends</i> that they are auto-sharing content merely by reading it.<p>Because the question is, what is the effect if others were to act like ourselves?<p>One action still rewards these evil social reader / frictionless sharing apps.<p>The alternative helps impede them.<p>I know which world I want to help create.

Am I wrong in thinking that you can just click cancel and it takes you to the article anyway?

The weird thing is this is so automated that it doesn't even convey any social proof. It's not "articles my friends actually thought were interesting" so much as "linkbait my friends fell for".

maybe im just paranoid, but a bit wary of installing chrome-ext without a quick perusal of the source. Is this github'ed?

Posting what articles one reads is a very bizarre feature- waiting for when this bites a political dissident someplace

Mediocre but (afair) working alternative solution. Create a friendlist with no-one (but yourself) And give those apps only stream_publish permission to that friendlist.

Cool stuff. What I usually do is click the link and then set the privacy level to "only me" so that no one knows what I'm reading.

I just highlight the title, right click and select "Search Google" usually... takes me to the same place without giving FB any info. Interesting app, but I'm weary of using Chrome because of the data it gives to Google. (Can't win these days - I just want to browse in peace! D: )

This is great. I wrote an article[1] on this exact topic after I felt that it was not getting the attention it deserved.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.saewitz.com/recently-read-articles-on-facebook" rel="nofollow">http://www.saewitz.com/recently-read-articles-on-facebook</a>

This doesn't work on Yahoo links, only on Guardian and WaPo links from what I can tell.

FYI - Updated the extension (due to a suggestion from a HN reader) to just do an "I'm feeling lucky" search, so now it's a one-click affair.

Thanks for this, this whole frictionless sharing/social reader stuff is the worst!

Seems to die if I try to open up chat, but otherwise its been solid for me.

Social might become a bit of a negative word online in a few years.