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Comment by bmelton | Hacker News Reader

I've tried (and failed) to delete my Facebook a couple times in the past, so this most recent go, when I quit using Facebook, I just quit using Facebook -- I uninstalled the apps from my phone, and mapped 'facebook.com' to localhost in my /etc/hosts files.

The result was... amusing. Facebook kept emailing me the "Hey, did you see what so and so posted?" emails, knowing full well that I didn't see them. But then, after that, I started getting weekly reminders that "You haven't updated your timeline in a week". Facebook, ever the clingy ex-girlfriend it is, seemed to start amping up the frequency of the emails the more I neglected them, so I started just marking them as spam.

Two blissful days went by in which Facebook wasn't a distraction, but then they shifted from email to SMS which, as an Android/Hangouts user, was even more annoying, since now I have to engage in multiple steps to delete.

They really, really want me to use their service.

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This is such a weird thing to think. You can turn off all notifications and they'll never contact you, ever.

I stopped using Facebook 6 years ago and haven't gotten a single email / sms from them since then, because I used the settings properly.

Yeah, if you just ghost them and never click "update your email settings" at the bottom of every email they send, they'll keep sending them.

If you think that is weird, consider what I have done. I manually went through 1100+ friends on facebook and unfollowed them all because facebook won't show me everything in the activity feed but rather tries to guess what I like best. My activity feed is now perfect because it is pretty much just me.

Yep--that's certainly weirder.

Yup, in an attempt to avoid falling into Facebook's echo chamber I have created a news feed that is funnily enough just my posts. At least this means I don't have any incentive to look at my news feed anymore.

Funny thing, I used to use Facebook for messenger and a news feed. Then they switched to this whole thing about forcing friends posts to come up first. Unfortunately this means now I get news I'm not interested in (memes, my grandma's crazy internet news, conspiracy theories from that guy I went to high school but have had 0 interaction on facebook with, etc). I also unfollow people that post crazy stuff and I keep getting their content. I've been trying to find that feed that you have, but good lord does facebook not want me to have it.

An earlier story:

"Facebook activated my dormant account and it won’t let me deactivate it"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13965134

The story there is an incredibly uncharitable reading of what actually happened. It appears as if the author's password was guessed and the account was reactivated. When he went to dispute this as account theft, they demanded ID to prove ownership.

That doesn't strike me as particularly unreasonable, rather projection of ill will onto Facebook. They have no way of knowing which person is actually the account owner, actual ID would definitively settle the matter.

> This is such a weird thing to think

It's weird to expect that deleting your account will result in the account being deleted and notifications for the account you no longer have to go away?

It's nice to know there's a workaround for when account deletion isn't respected, but you could skip the incredulity, you shouldn't have to go through your settings, and your settings shouldn't affect your notifications, if you delete your account.

> It's weird to expect that deleting your account will result in the account being deleted and notifications for the account you no longer have to go away?

But the person above just stopped using their account, didn't delete it (or disable it, which is what facebook sends you on the path towards), so that is why the notifications continued. They still had an active account, just hadn't logged in for some time.

Yes, but the person above only had an account to stop using because Facebook wouldn't delete it when asked, similar to the OP's post. Reasonable / normal expectation is that notifications should have stopped the first time.

Regardless of account deletion attempts, they knew they had an active account and didn't change any notification settings. They still expected Facebook to magically know to stop sending them notifications. That is weird.

"Regardless of account deletion attempts"? Seriously? First step of account deletion is, that Facebook deactivates the account, therefore, they should also know better to not send notifications. Why would they burden the user with notification settings, when the users wish/intent is clear enough? Spamming them with unwanted notifications is unethical behavior.

Yes, seriously. They made it pretty clear that _their account was still active_. That's why it's "regardless": it doesn't matter for the situation at hand.

> when the users wish/intent is clear

How is it clear? Their whole post is stating that all they did was not use the site for a bit.

Given that they have an active account and notification are set to notify, why would they ever assume you no longer want notifications? They could very well want all of those notifications (since they have them turned off), so not sending them would actually be the exact opposite of what it should do.

This would be like if my post office stopped delivering my mail because I didn't call them up and tell them to keep delivering my mail.

Yes, you're right, this time they didn't try to delete. I read the comment, I understand what happened.

Why should @bmelton expect Facebook to respect the notification settings after he has evidence they didn't respect the account deletion request multiple times?

It's not weird nor is it magic to expect Facebook to stop the notifications. That's what pretty much all other web sites and services currently do. They may ping you several times, but eventually they will stop. I know because I run a service that does this, and I pay attention to what other services are doing, and I care about what is socially acceptable. Facebook, unlike other services, ramps up their notification schedule when you get quiet, rather than assuming that no contact and no response after multiple attempts means you don't want to use their service.

What Facebook is doing is what's weird here.

Elsewhere in this thread, @wpietri makes a compelling argument that were Facebook a person in your life, the increasing notifications would be considered very annoying and needy. This is the reason it's weird for a company to do the same thing.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15392947

You're just conflating issues here. Nobody disagrees that Facebook is behaving in a scummy way. People simply think it's weird to complain about an endless stream of FB messages when the solution is in plain sight.

> It's not weird nor is it magic to expect Facebook to stop the notifications. That's what pretty much all other web sites and services currently do.

No, it's not. This would be like if my post office stopped delivering my mail because I didn't call them up and tell them to keep delivering my mail.

The post office isn't a web site. Many web sites do stop delivering mail, I know because I've checked, and because I run one. The post office does stop delivering your mail if it's returned to sender multiple times. The post office will also respect your first cancellation request, and they don't send you letters or text you every day reminding you to use the post office more because they noticed you haven't sent a letter today. So I don't buy your analogy.

Alright, let's ignore the analogy, then.

What is the correct functionality for Facebook given this user's settings?

I do not agree that it should stop sending notifications. Let's say I _want_ to keep getting notifications via email without having to open Facebook every so often. I would have my settings match theirs and I would be quite annoyed if it just stopped working because I didn't log in.

You don't have to open Facebook, you just have to receive your notification, e.g., read their email. They know when their reminders to use Facebook are being avoided.

You might be lumping all notifications into the same bucket. There's a difference between a Facebook message that notifies you of someone else IMing or commenting on your photo, and a Facebook message that reminds you to use Facebook or upsell you on services.

That difference has standard terminology in the web business sphere: transactional email vs marketing email. Generally speaking these things have a hard line between them, and are easy to define & separate. Marketing is sales, and transactional is private notifications about your account activity & private notifications from social contacts. Marketing is what other sites stop sending after too much inaction, and marketing is what Facebook is increasing in response to inaction. Transactional notifications don't stop, and they shouldn't stop. I suspect you're misunderstanding me and assuming I'm talking about all email, and not just marketing.

I really appreciate the explanation. That is actually super informative.

I agree that I misunderstood part of what you were saying. It also sounds like we both agree that the notifications ("transactional email", from the sounds of it) should be going through. I was only ever trying to make a statement about those types of emails. I agree that upping the marketing emails is pretty bad.

I think this line in particular is where I misunderstood:

> It's not weird nor is it magic to expect Facebook to stop the notifications.

In this case, I interpret "notifications" as "transactional emails".

That's not what they expected. They didn't explain expectations. They didn't expect what happened though: FB notifications got more and more pushy over time. That's interesting to remark on regardless of whether or not you'd expect it.

You make a fair point that the OC didn't explicitly declare that they expected the emails to stop.

However, if that isn't the basis of their expectation, I don't really understand the rest of their post. Especially "knowing full well that I didn't see them" (how?) and proceeding to mark the emails as spam... instead of turning off the notifications...

The latter is why I believe they expected the notifications to stop.

Edit: as far as the notifications getting more frequent, that actually is pretty interesting, but not really relevant to the other points made.

> Especially "knowing full well that I didn't see them" (how?)

Are you not aware that Facebook is attempting to track emails and links for everyone? The mechanisms are numerous and varied, but putting "tracking pixels" in HTML emails is standard practice. If you ever ran a Mailchimp list, you'd know you get reports on who received your email, who opened and looked at them, who clicked any link in them, etc.

Facebook also track visits to any site on the web with Facebook integration, via cookies, which is a large number of popular sites. They know when you've seen their emails, if you're like "most people" and you use hotmail or gmail and not pine. You have to be pretty privacy & security adept to have a Facebook account and avoid getting tracked. 99% of people who use Facebook are not adept enough (or just don't care enough to fight it), and their emails & visits to Facebook and elsewhere are tracked.

I wonder if a strategy of coopting a group of friends to flag your messages that have some cryptic message everyone claims is inappropriate would trigger a full deletion like his obscene messages strategy.

Is it? "I'll leave them alone and they'll leave me alone" seems like a pretty normal thing to think.

Me, I think it's weird to think: "It's perfectly reasonable that if you once give somebody your email they will bother you until the end of time unless you jump through any arbitrary hoops they set up."

If every email they send has an unsubscribe link and you don't click it, you're kind of losing the reasonable grounds to expect them to stop emailing you.

I've done this before, just let myself keep getting emails and hoped they stopped. Then I just clicked all of the unsubscribe links they are legally required to put in every email, and I never got an email again.

You don't have to hope for what you want, you can act upon it.

I understand that's the culture we've established. If a company has your address, it is currently acceptable for them to send you infinite electronic marketing nonsense in an attempt to manipulate you into being a profitable resource for them.

My point is that it's not how it normally works with humans. If a person did this, it would be creepy and controlling. But when a group of people does it because it might make them money, it's ok to blame the person they're bothering.

I get your perspective and agree that it is, for the moment, the dominant one. I just disagree that it's weird to think otherwise.

I apologize if it seems like I'm making a moral judgement.

I don't think it's any more ideal to have to opt out of communications, I'm merely saying that expecting not to have to opt out is a misjudgement.

I'd rather more closely understand reality than hope it gives me exactly what I want. Facebook does not owe me anything.

well to be fair it is how it normally works with humans. If someone has your physical address they can send you as much junk as they want in the mail. It's not really different online.

Normal human interaction is not conducted mostly by post.

So snail mail isn't a good standard for email...what is a good standard?

A good standard is another question. We're discussing what standards are weird. I am saying that normal human interaction is not a weird standard. Neither is paper mail.

Although when bringing up paper mail, we should note there are many different standards. Are we talking the standards of 1792, when the USPS was created? Perhaps we use the 1879 mail classification act? The 1920s, when the Direct Mail Advertising Association was formed? How about around the time of the junk mail controversy of 1953? Or perhaps 1970, when Chief Justice Warren Berger wrote, "Everyman's mail today is made up overwhelmingly of material he did not seek from persons he does not know. And all too often it is matter he finds offensive."

The advice I got was to never click any links in spam email. I think the rationale was three part:

1) Clicking "unsubscribe" confirmed that you received the spam mail, so spammers would activate your email address on their other lists, thereby increasing the amount of spam you received. Otoh, acting like /dev/null increased the chance that spammers culled your address to increase their apparent delivery ratio.

2) Following those links gives the spammer access to your web browser, along with tracking cookies, and chances to exploit any plugin vulnerabilities.

3) Your chances of getting phished are way higher if you follow mail that looks like it's from ICQ than if you just go directly to icq.com and find their unsubscribe settings. (I didn't say I got that advice recently....)

That applies to spam from an unknown sender, not a bona fide company you have a relationship with. Messages from Facebook about your account are hardly unsolicited. I don't think it's useful to call every email you don't like "spam".

If the user didn't opt in to a notification, then by definition, it is unsolicited.

He probably has opted in without noticing. Quick show of hands: How reads all ToS that they agree to?

Whatever the fine-print legalities, if you didn't notice, I don't think it can count as opting in.

No disagreement from my side, but that's how the law generally [1] works.

[1] In Germany, there is a specific section of the public code governing ToS ("AGB-Gesetz", part of the BGB). Among other things, it forbids "unexpected" terms, acknowledging that people usually cannot read all the ToS that they have to agree to in practice. Quite a few ToS have been nullified by courts because of that rule.

> If every email they send has an unsubscribe link

On Facebook, the unsubscribe link is very fine-grained, and is specific to the exact type of notification the link appeared on. I don't think you can fault anyone for giving up on them if you use one but still get Facebook spam.

In fact, those unsubscribe links are the only fine-grained way to control notifications. You can't only preemptively subscribe to the specific notifications you want. The options you get are all, nothing, or dick around with dozens of unsubscribe links for weeks.

Facebook is all dark UI patterns. It's so bad to the point where I don't think any user can be faulted for not knowing how get it to do what they want.

> It's so bad to the point where I don't think any user can be faulted for not knowing how get it to do what they want.

I just don't buy this. I don't get emails. I didn't have to contact customer support. I didn't have to ask for help. I just clicked the link in the email and turned everything off.

> I just clicked the link in the email and turned everything off.

That's false; Facebook demonstrably does not work that way at present. If you're getting Facebook emails, the unsubscribe link is scoped only to the particular type of email notification it appeared on. You'll continue to get all the others until you click unsubscribe on each individually, or go into the settings and disable email notifications totally.

Again, they use dark and overly complicated UX patterns to make difficult for people to unsubscribe totally, and this is almost certainly intentional (but deniable). I think it's totally reasonable for someone just assume Facebook's whole unsubscribe system doesn't work, as it's not really reasonable to expect people to invest the time to learn Facebook's deliberately bad unsubscribe system.

Anecdote incoming: I've turned off every notification setting possible on my Facebook account. The issue is that every time they add a new notification "feature" it seems like they flip all of them back on again. All as if to say, "Everybody wants a daily/weekly rollup of what happened on Facebook! Subscribe everybody by default!"

So I feel the GP's pain, I've taken to marking them as spam as well because I know that my settings aren't guaranteed to stay where they are. It's not even in Facebook's best interest to try and keep my notification settings where they are.

I've had notifications disabled for at least a year and have never had this happen.

They're probably A/B testing it, and you're the control group.

Or resetting those settings to try to get back some high earning users. Ignoring those they don't profit from.

Or maybe observing country-specific laws and regulations

Same here. For at least 5 years.

The growth hacker mentality was cute when FB was a scrappy little startup. Now they're dominant, it's just creepy.

“Growth hacking” is always creepy.

> cute when [...] was a scrappy little startup. Now they're dominant, it's just creepy.

Microsoft/Gates also had trouble with this. What is "business hardball" in a startup, can be illegal conduct in an almost-monopoly.

In a kitten, pouncing aggression is cute... in a liger, not so much. For the same behavior, you'd put it down.

Individuals can similarly fail to recognize transitions. "You can't do X." "But I've been doing X for years!" "Yes, but here you have relationship Y, so X is no longer ethical/legal."

In a liger. Indeed.

It was always creepy.

For a long time I intentionally configured Facebook to only send me notifications by email and only when someone added me or tagged me, since I almost never actually signed in to see those things.

At some point or another they decided to expand this to include re-engagement garbage like "{{Some person you haven't interacted with in 10 years}} {{ commented on their status || uploaded a photo || added a video}}!", so now I've turned off everything but security alerts.

My current frustration is how they won't let you get notifications about new messages by email. I don't want the app, I don't want to 'delete' my account since we know it doesn't really remove anything and I'd rather retain a semblance of control, but I also don't want to leave the occasional person hanging who tries to contact me via Facebook Messenger, since people can still message you even if you mark yourself 'offline'.

I know this is completely intentional and designed to get me to install the Messenger app and look at their ads, but damn if it doesn't grind my gears. If I could go back to 2005 I never would have made a Facebook account to begin with.

just FYI, I never see ads on Messenger app

they've reset my email settings twice I think

Facebook "tricked" me into getting texts for 2fa, now texts me at weird times with crap like: your friends posted 84 updates since last week (why would I care).

I never asked FB to send me any texts other than for 2fa and this is pushy and unwelcome.

Just curious, if you want to go and never visit it, why don't you just delete your account? That way you'd not have to worry about retroactive hacks, and you aren't bound by Facebook TOS anymore.

I deactivated first for about 6 months, didn't get any communication from them. Eventually I went to delete and used a link from deletefacebook.com taking me straight to the right page. Maybe it was because I was on mobile but there wasn't any emotional blackmail begging me to stay and it was done. I was expecting much worse but the experience was quite smooth for me and I'm happily free of Facebook for good now.

Enjoy real life!! In the months I had no Facebook, life was amazing and I was more productive, though a bit lonely mainly because I live in a foreign country adn my family is thousands of miles away.

Both of my siblings live abroad but I stay in touch through messaging. Facebook always made me feel my relationships there were shallow, and many people I regularly interacted with never followed up off-site. For me this is a good thing. Pruning false relationships frees up time to invest properly in those relationships that really matter. Facebook gets in the way of social relationships, you can't see who really matters while you're distracted talking to people you'll probably never meet again. Quality > Quantity every time.

Psychological lesson in that:

The best advice I've ever read for the spouse who is on the receiving end of a divorce request/demand and wishes for reparation is to acquiesce quickly and approach the ordeal as a business transaction. You'll find story after story of anecdotes of that working to allow a couple to repair relations and figure out what was broken. Much better than being very emotional and otherwise reinforcing the reasons for the divorce request in the first place.

I think FB is being wise in taking this approach considering how difficult it is to find the real "delete" as opposed to "pause" button.

That's a lesson I've applied to many areas of business to very good outcomes -- customers wishing to terminate, etc.

> Eventually I went to delete and used a link from deletefacebook.com taking me straight to the right page.

Just out of curiosity, does anyone know whether by "deleting" your account, facebook removes your account/data completely or do they just mark your account deleted?

Is facebook required to remove your account from all data sources ( dbs, failover sites, recovery sites and even the backup tapes )?

I know certain sites, when you "delete" your account, it just updates a column marking your account "deleted" or "inactive".

But I'm most curious about the backup tapes of logs/data.

I don't know how certain we can really be, I had the same concerns myself, I could just keep my account disabled and stop feeding information to Facebook but still keep access to it myself if I ever needed it. Or I delete my account, Facebook maybe has access to that data but I do not, it was a thought process that delayed my action for a while.

This non-committal situation created some anxiety for me, it was a decision that still needed to be made in my mind so wouldn't go away.

Then Bryan Lunduke went through the process on his YouTube channel and he claims his contacts at Facebook were unable to find his data once it was deleted, so that was good enough to push me off the fence and I finally made the decision to delete.

I can never be absolutely certain but there's really not much more I can do besides use European privacy laws to try and force the issue, but that probably won't do much about the NSA backup. ;) But my mind is at rest now, I don't worry about it apart from doing my best to limit tracking online but that's another story.

I don’t see why that isn’t expected. Next time try deactivate it instead of uninstall the app, then there is an option to opt out communication. In your account settings, you can also opt out. I have not received a single email from facebook since then (although I am back on it again).

I did not expect them to ramp up the amount of notification spam 100-fold as I engage with the service less.

I've no intention of logging back in to check my notification settings, but when I was using Facebook, I would get a push notification maybe once or twice every couple of days. Now, I get more than a dozen SMS messages a day.

I've built notification systems in the past, and in every instance, respecting the fact that abusing the notification power entrusted to us by our customers was seen as a cardinal sin. Maybe it's the absence of that respect that has catapulted Facebook to where it is, or the presence of it that's held me back in my own endeavors, I don't know, but man, as the recipient of all this spam, it really, really feels unsavory, and further evaporates whatever trust I might have had in the platform.

Hmm that is odd. I get the phone notification because I had thst problem if I didn’t remove the app and if I haven’t been on facebook for more than a day.

I think the “user is idle let’s poke the user” is a supposedly a “nice” user engagement to get users back on the system. I hear your concern.

I think at this point:

* opt out notifications before deactivate your account (go to account settings)

* deactivate and opt-out notification at the time of deactivation

* set facebook email as spam or something (although you’d miss any potential real security notifications.)

Or you can also remove your phone number and change the account’s email address. I own a dozen gmail accounts, one for mailing list, one for billing, one for personal, one for school, one for important tech accounts like digital ocean/aws, one for banks, one for general garabge I don’t care and so on. I also run a YouTube channel with a friend so I also own a separate gmail account to be added as a manager of the channel.

Much neater than labels (amazon emails can fuck me up easily, ugh).

I highly recommend this multi-email account approach. I can ignore 50 emails sitting in other accounts most of the time. All of them have second auth and some accounts have different passwords for additional security. Not hard to manage because the address format is always <A>.<purpose>@gmail.com. Consistency!!

Sounds like you could benefit (to some extent except ignoring certain inboxes) from a custom email domain and enabling catch-all. I use this in order to segregate people(services mainly) sending me emails to different addresses that I don't have to manually create (but can easily block/disable an entire address)

The only major issue I've had, with gsuite at least, is not being able to reply from one of the not-actually-existent addresses on my domain.

Try Fastmail. If you want to reply you can setup a sending identity with the necessary email address. You don't have to do anything ahead of time.

Sweet, will check it out, I'm not particularly attached to gsuite

They also have a neat way of doing wildcard delivery if you use them for DNS: tag@name.domain.com gets translated to name+tag@domain.com.

This would definitely help with douchebag sites that consider "+" an invalid character

I was going to, but looking at the benefit of having the rest of the Google applications and being free, I didn't.

> I've built notification systems in the past, and in every instance, respecting the fact that abusing the notification power entrusted to us by our customers was seen as a cardinal sin.

The keyword in your sentence is customers. The people using Facebook aren't its customers, they're the product and thus open season for all kinds of nefarious things you'd never do to your customers.

Why can't you just click 'unsubscribe' in the bottom of the email?

If they don't provide the unsubscribe option as a one-click option, mark their emails as spam. It's harsh, but getting flagged for spam when they won't stop spamming you or providing the required one-click opt-out is their problem, not yours.

It is fairly easy to configure Facebook notifications the way you want them to be (for example, I want to know when someone logs into my account, but nothing else). I post on my timeline less than once a month, and receive no notifications. Not to defend Facebook, but notifications are hardly its biggest annoyance.

My email preferences have everything disabled, double triple and quadruple checked to make sure, and I still occasionally get an email about one of my FB friends uploading a photo or some shit that is certainly (a) described by the settings as email I should not receive, and (b) not even what a notification should be. “A person with whom you’ve never interacted aside from accepting a friend request said something not about you on their own timeline.” ???

This is not true. They offer no fine-grained control besides dicking around with dozens of unsubscribe links over several weeks.

For instance, how do you easily configure Facebook to ONLY send you emails when you're invited to an event or someone sends you a Facebook message, but NOT when your friends post random stuff?

I have to agree on the no fine-grained control. My point was that it is easy to opt out of the notifications by email in general. I'm positive that there is an option where you receive a notification when someone send you a message, but I don't think it is possible to get event invitation notifications only.

It's so humorous. I never managed to activate my Facebook account (lucky me). Some "database error", or so it says. So I have never actually even logged in. But they do have an email address I used when I tried to create an account and it gets multiple emails per week with friend recommendations. They all get routed to my spam folder.

I set one up with my primary email address probably 10 years ago just to block someone else doing it. I keep their IP space blocked on my local network (but not my mail server - I try to be a good netizen). I have probably seen a facebook.com page three or four times since then - misclicks at work, etc. And never while 'logged in'[1].

I still get an endless stream of spam from them.

"Facebook - more AOL than AOL ever was."

[1] whatever that means, wrt them.

> (but not my mail server - I try to be a good netizen)

Blocking sources of spam is part of being a "good netizen".

Being reachable by other admins is what I was referring to[1]. I do aggressively block pure-spam hosts, of course, but I can't consider FB one of those.

[1] I find it exceedingly unlikely that FB mail admins would need to reach me to troubleshoot something, but it is the principle.

I get a monthly email from Facebook entitled "Help your friends recognize you".

I think my friends recognize me thank you very much Facebook, otherwise they're not, you know, my actual friends?

I removed everything from my account about 6 or so years ago, and instead of deleting it just stopped logging in completely. So far not a single E-mail from them. I'm afraid to log back in even if to simply delete the account, because I don't want to "tickle the tiger" and suddenly start being treated as a user...

Same for Twitter. I signed up once a long, long time ago, and maybe tweeted once and never logged in again. Occasionally I get E-mails from them about people (bots?) who "follow" me despite my inactivity. It's likely because my twitter handle is pretty short and an actual name, so probably some people get confused and follow the wrong person.

I got similar crap from them after two and a half weeks in Africa on holiday a year ago, because the internet so slow it wasn't worth checking Facebook.

Recently I have been busy with a new job, started meditating and reading my Kindle rather than a backlit screen. I use Facebook maybe 15% compared to a month ago. Life feels a bit better better as a result. Kind of like giving up smoking, or cutting down. It's just mental clutter.

I'm not sure why the emails are a big deal; they are pretty much trivial to filter out. Marking them as spam is probably not helpful in the bigger picture. I just let them accumulate in their own folder in gmail, they don't hurt anyone there.

They really, really want you to be their product.

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