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[-] Zagorath@aussie.zone 232 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I fucking hate the way Facebook changed how the site works so that clicking on an image no longer puts it in your browser history. Earlier today I saw a post where the swimmer whose track was shown in this specific image responded to the comments. It was actually quite an amusing interaction and I wish I could go back and share it here.

But also: the swimmer was a she, not a he.

edit:

wait I found it:

Sophie's link: https://sophie-adaptive-athlete.com/2023/01/18/2023-channel-swim-introduction/

Text transcriptionA series of Facebook comments.

Claire Fletcher: He didn’t make it. Is he ok or he still swimming? [attached is a close-up of the path, showing that it ends some distance away from the coastline]

Sophie Etheridge - Adaptive Athlete: Claire Fletcher I did make it, the GPS transponder was on my pilot boat but the beach was too shallow for it to come in close enough so instead my pilot launched the small RIB boat to accompany me to shore 🙂

Melissa Dupree Haws: Sophie Etheridge - Adaptive Athlete wow! The real swimmer here! I’m so amazed at this feat of athleticism.

Claire Fletcher: Sophie Etheridge - Adaptive Athlete omg the actual swimmer is here AND a she not a he! That’s amazing! What made you want to do it? Was it a personal goal or for charity? Full respect to you by the way, well done!👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

Robert Mothersole: Sophie Etheridge - Adaptive Athlete so while you're here, if you dont mind me asking.....Why didn't you go straight ?

Sophie Etheridge - Adaptive Athlete: Robert Mothersole I did, in the English Channel the tides move up and down rather than across so you get 6 hours up, then 6 hours down. I swam on a Spring tide, which is a bigger tide to start with and I'm not a super fast swimmer (around 2 min 15 per 100m). So i was pushed up the channel for 6 hours, then down the channel for 6 hours twice...so i was swimming forwards but going sideways, if that makes sense?

Sophie Etheridge - Adaptive Athlete: Claire Fletcher its a long story...it was a personal, life changing goal, it raised money for charity and that money went to training swimming teachers to become specialist disability swimming teachers. If you want to know more then I write a blog and during the year of my channel training I documented my training each month. This is the first one explaining about me/how I got to where I was at the time - https://sophie-adaptive-athlete.com/.../2023-channel.../ If you scroll through my other blog posts I wrote multiple blogs about my actual swim too 🙂

Claire Fletcher: Sophie Etheridge - Adaptive Athlete that’s truly amazing! Well done you! Should be very proud of yourself! I am going to binge read your blogs now with a cuppa lol

Robert Mothersole: Sophie Etheridge - Adaptive Athlete it does make sense, it's a bit different from the local swimming baths, thanks for your answer and congratulations on swimming the Channel. Brilliant achievement 👍

Sophie Etheridge - Adaptive Athlete: Claire Fletcher hope you enjoyed them and your cuppa!

[-] muzzle@lemmy.zip 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Can someone explain the "I did it for charity" angle? I never understood why would someone do a sporty thing, that they clearly wanted to do and would probably do anyway, motivate me or anyone else to donate money to a charity. To be honest it always felt quite performative and self serving to me.

[-] droans@midwest.social 5 points 17 hours ago

You get people to "pledge" donations. It's partly about raising awareness for the charity and partly because a lot of people are more likely to donate to these types of drives versus donating just because.

[-] itslilith 12 points 22 hours ago

Think of it the other way around, doing extreme athletic feats (even for fun) is a great way to attract attention, and using that momentum to attract sponsors for charity is a nice extra to do some good

[-] Zagorath@aussie.zone 119 points 1 day ago

Also, there was this hilarious comment under the original image:

Matthew Bowen: Fucking idiot. Obviously he couldn’t go straight for completely obvious reasons that I’m completely familiar with, as I assume everyone is too. What a loser

[-] purplemonkeymad@programming.dev 21 points 1 day ago

In case you are interested, facebook now opens links in a site of thier's, but it contains an embedded window of the site you were linked to. This means that facebook can follow any other links you follow while on that site. It has the site effect of you not visiting that site but instead facebook's "hidden window" shows in the history.

It has no practical reason to exist other than allowing them to gather more data.

Some mobile browsers might have an add-in to auto-break you out of the window.

[-] Zagorath@aussie.zone 4 points 1 day ago

I'm not actually sure what you mean, but if I'm understanding it correctly, uhh, what? No they don't. If you click an external link on Facebook they send you to it with a redirect, so they know you went to that site, but they don't know of any further links you might click.

But anyway, that's not relevant to this here, because it was a photo shared on Facebook, not an external link.

Ah sorry, I was slightly off, they used their own embedded browser in the app. So your external browser does not save the history as it was not used.

https://krausefx.com/blog/ios-privacy-instagram-and-facebook-can-track-anything-you-do-on-any-website-in-their-in-app-browser

Yea didn't realise it was just an image, I was responding to the "doesn't show in history" comment.

[-] Zagorath@aussie.zone 4 points 1 day ago

Oh right. Yeah I haven't had the Facebook app installed on my phone in like a decade.

But yeah, clicking on an image on the Facebook website doesn't actually add it to your browser history, because Facebook tries to act like an SPA, a decision they made seemingly specifically to frustrate the user. Because in addition to not adding clicked images to your browser history, they also will refresh the page if you tab away and come back after a minute or two.

[-] EldritchFeminity 3 points 1 day ago

If I understand what they're saying (I'm not quite sure either), Facebook basically does a Man in the Middle Attack when you click a link that allows them to see what you click on after leaving their page?

On the one hand, it sounds crazy, but on the other it doesn't sound outside the realm of possibility based on other things they supposedly do like create shadow accounts of people you and other people know/talk about to build a data profile on them and people they may know so that if they create an account, Facebook already knows what people are in their area and likely in their social circles (and the stuff that they actually do right out in the open where it's obvious).

Still irrelevant to the issue anyway, but weird to think about. More to the point at hand, I wonder if your issue is caused by Facebook opening the picture in some kind of container instead of the actual page/link itself, like how Reddit opens images on the Reddit page when you try to open them directly - it won't let you view the image as a source file if you try to open it from a search engine.

[-] ruuster13@lemmy.zip 30 points 1 day ago

"They're replacing the internet with something else" is literal. It's harder and harder to find what you want because you're not allowed to have what you want anymore. You're allowed to work hard till you die and hope Big Tech shares its merciful bounty with you. You can't spell "social media" without "soma."

[-] Psythik@lemmy.world 21 points 1 day ago
[-] caurvo@aussie.zone 12 points 1 day ago

I'm still in it for niche hobby groups. Unfortunately the kind of information I'm looking for is hard to come by elsewhere. Even Reddit was not as good a source of community knowledge for these activities.

[-] stevedice@sh.itjust.works 13 points 1 day ago

Imma go on a limb here and guess it's because they want to.

[-] jaggedrobotpubes@lemmy.world 12 points 1 day ago

That only creates additional, trickier questions.

[-] chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 13 points 1 day ago

Facebook has lots of interesting groups for hobbies and other interests. Yes, you can find groups like that outside of Facebook but they’re often much smaller and less active (unless you go to Reddit).

[-] TheReturnOfPEB@reddthat.com 4 points 1 day ago

hobbies that fund Zuckerberg's Hawaiian bunker

[-] chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Hawaiian bunker hobbies!

Who knows. Maybe one day Zuck will be chilling in his bunker and the next Krakatoa will erupt underneath him!

[-] Zagorath@aussie.zone 5 points 1 day ago

Why are you being judgy about what websites someone uses?

[-] Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 1 day ago

because they're using a website that is complicit in making the world a lot worse? not sure how this is a strange concept on lemmy

[-] massive_bereavement@fedia.io 1 points 1 day ago

That was Sophie's choice.

[-] jsomae@lemmy.ml 11 points 1 day ago

AND a she not a he! That's amazing!

It would be more amazing if it were a he, not a she; all the best long-distance swimmers are women. Women have a significant advantage at this level.

[-] Zagorath@aussie.zone 8 points 1 day ago

Eh, not really. It's more that at this level the difference in performance between men and women closes significantly, with some ultra swim records being held by women. For the English Channel specifically, the current record for speed of crossing is held by a man. So it's not particularly amazing that it was a woman (though it is amazing that it was a physically disabled woman!), but neither would it have been amazing had it been a man.

[-] jsomae@lemmy.ml 2 points 18 hours ago

ah, didn't realize this. Thanks for explaining!

[-] CoolThingAboutMe@beehaw.org 16 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

There's a sports scientist, I've forgotten her name but she wrote a book called Women are Not Small Men. In her book she says that long distance swimming is one sport that women actually outperform men in.

Edit: her name is Stacy Sims

[-] kazerniel@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago

thanks for finding the source, pretty interesting!

this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2025
614 points (100.0% liked)

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