Exporting Facebook Comments, Again

November 30th, 2024
comments, tech
I want comments on my social media crossposts to show up on my blog as a comment section, and mostly this works well: modern systems (Mastodon, Bluesky, LessWrong, etc) provide APIs where you can load the replies associated with a post. On the other hand, older systems like Facebook are more locked down: they want to keep your content inside the platform as part of their economic moat.

Still, Facebook will show all the comments on a post to anyone who visits it, even if logged out. You have to dismiss a popup and click "show more" and "see replies" a few times, but it's all public. At times I've written scripts to export the comments, but they're quite brittle: Facebook doesn't design their pages to be easy to scrape, and so my code has relied on incidental things that only happen to work.

Even though this is not a permanent solution, I've had another go at writing a comment exporter (code). It's not as thorough as past times: I couldn't figure out easy was to get the timestamp or links to the comment on Facebook, and I've left both out. I also had to switch my opt-out from working on user id to user name, which is less robust. But it works! I've gone back through June 2019, fetching comments for any posts where I was missing them.

Referenced in: Commenting Patterns by Platform

Comment via: facebook, lesswrong, mastodon, bluesky

Recent posts on blogs I like:

Effective Altruism: Importance, Tractability, Neglectedness

One of the most distinctive features of effective altruism is the use of the importance, tractability, and neglectedness framework for evaluating charities.

via Thing of Things April 23, 2025

Impact, agency, and taste

understand + work backwards from the root goal • don’t rely too much on permission or encouragement • make success inevitable • find your angle • think real hard • reflect on your thinking

via benkuhn.net April 19, 2025

Which Came First, the Chicken or the Egg?

When I thought about this question it was really hard to figure out because the way it's phrased it's essentially either a chicken just pops into existence, or an egg just pops into existence, without any parent animals involved. I thought about t…

via Lily Wise's Blog Posts April 13, 2025

more     (via openring)