[edgeless]

Thanks for the reply, tanzeelniazi. Yes, that's what I mentioned. Simply disabling the FB Like button for threads makes the pages load smoothly again.

One thing I forgot to add is that when the thread Like button is enabled on my site, about 10% of the time the described brief post blanking events will result in post anchor landing point failures. That is, sometimes when a user clicks on a link for an individual post or a link to the last reply in a thread, they will end up at a point where the post that matches the link they clicked on is out of the screen view. As such, they are forced to manually scroll back to the post. This intermittent anchor point avoidance behavior never occurred before the load blanking started. And this is the thing that bothers me the most about Facebook's apparent change to the way the thread Like button loads now. I hope it's just a temporary glitch in their code and it may be resolved soon.

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Follow-up:
Facebook has apparently fixed the issue. The thread Like button is loading smoothly again on my site.