You Can't Kick Me Off Facebook, I Quit
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Complaining he had no right to appeal and comparing Facebook to a nation, or dictatorship (or even the nazis just for a deleted account on a free service) is out of place in my opinion. Facebook is not a nation at all nor it has to behave like one, it is a business, with rules you agree on signing.
One way customers increase firm profits is by paying. But, in two-sided markets customers increase profits apart from what they actually pay. An example of two-sided market is a dating site. You could charge men and women. But, if you charge women more, fewer will join, and the site becomes less valuable to men. The optimal solution may be to charge women nothing so you can charge men more. But, you're kidding yourself if you think that only men are your customers. The men are paying in cash, but the women are also paying by increasing the sites value. Indeed, it is likely that one non-paying woman is worth more than one subscribing man.
Facebook users are also customers. They're paying Facebook with a lot of valuable data and eyeballs.
It's also a popular idea in the wider world of business, which predates FB by several thousand years. If you are interested in an abstract theory of wealth, that's great. But the rest of the world transacts in money, which is brought in as revenue and paid out as expenses. At the risk of oversimplifying, when you subtract the latter from the former and the number is greater than 0, then you can make a claim of profitability. Users donating data and attention might be good for your business model and help increase profits indirectly. But they are fundamentally different from customers who pay money (a means of transferring wealth) to use your product or service (a form of wealth).
Counter-example: Barnes and Noble does not consider users who visit their stores to read books and magazines without paying for them as customers. They provide B&N with incredibly valuable data (e.g. which books and magazines people want to read) and eyeballs, but they aren't customers. And neither are Facebook users.
So the original point, "you have no right to complain because you don't pay to use it," is silly. Whether or not users have a RIGHT to complain, FB should prefer responding to their complaints over losing them as users.
As it happens, it seems that most FB users aren't phased by anything FB does in terms of privacy or heavy-handed policies. So unless those complaints get loud enough to signal that users are about to start leaving en masse, FB doesn't need to care.
Whether I pay you, or make your product more valuable so other people will pay you is irrelevant. Whether you call me a customer or not is irrelevant. You should treat me well if you want to stay in business.
I don't see how the B&N example fits. Browsers aren't making the bookstore more valuable to people who actually pay. Plus they take up seats. Get rid of browsers and B&N makes more money. Get rid of Facebook users and there is no Facebook.
So making sure your users happy is an important part of your business because otherwise you're mismanaging your inventory. But you're free to decide that some of your inventory is too expensive to maintain vs. the value you and your customers derive from it, and it doesn't make sense to carry it anymore.
There's even a handy Amazon link from within the article!
My crime appears to have been removing spam posts that were advertising affiliate links and pyramid schemes and the likes.
Obviously I've just been blocked from full access with no questions to me and no way for me to enquire if I'll ever get any of that access back or indeed if they plan on someone else taking an editorial view of the page. The page meanwhile is going to the dogs filling with more and more spam.
Obviously my actions weren't nice for some people either - spammers need to spam to make money and I was obviously preventing that.
So, I think my point is it cuts both ways and that Facebook appear to be rather haphazardly managing their monsterlith.
I tend to be anti FB, but I do agree that it's annoying to get so many invites from marketeers. Maybe the age difference explains this difference in attitude, but for me it's actually clear =/
But it does really highlight perfectly the way facebook acts as the purest crossover between marketing and socialisng. Disturbing to say the least.
Anyway, he should get a twitter account instead. Twitter's about talking, Facebook is about harvesting your personal data and relationships for better marketing.
He also, I think, doesn't understand spam. He comes from a world where paper scarcity offsets the desire of marketers to send out advertisements. The idea that marketing is so easy that it needs to be regulated and avoided unless your targets initiate it is completely alien to him.
He could say the same about spam:
"I was flabbergasted. Going too fast sending messages? Wasn't sending messages what email was for?"
This sort of excuse is weak, and you could use it to justify abusing anything.
I read this article as a documentary of how a spammer is born. "The road to hell is paved with good intentions."
No one likes to see himself as an asshole, instead we make decisions without thinking about the consequences to other people, only our benefits.
Clearly he doesn't understand what the purpose of facebook is, or internet netiquette for that matter. I always felt that Facebook is in an eternal september, I guess this just supports that notion.
I recently helped my father (also in his 50's) join Facebook, and I wouldn't be surprised if he goes on a friending spree. He already has a history of sending "free" greeting cards to anyone whose email address he has. In fact, reading this made me aware of the need to make sure he isn't inadvertently abusing Facebook.
It wasn't meant as an ageist statement, but I think it's a safe bet that the majority of older people (hackers aside) are late adopters. His own son told him "If you're on Facebook, it's over."
says the US american "military expert". Fact is, the Sharia allows the accused to defend himself. I am not saying that I think the Sharia is good, but linked article contains gusting fear-mongering.
Herself, not so much.
Your account was disabled because your behavior on the site was identified as harassing or threatening to other people on Facebook. Prohibited behavior includes, but is not limited to:
Soliciting others for dating or business purposes
Richard's standard reply: "I write about military aviation and I'm the author of a new book on the V-22 Osprey. I like to use Facebook to connect with people who have similar interests and spread the word about my book. I hope you'll check it out on my Facebook Wall.
At the end of the day, shouldn't we be blaming his daughter?
The two responses I got from friends were "What the fuck is this astroturfing bullshit? Has your account been hacked or are you really just this much of an asshole? ", and "cool! I'll check this out.", by another friend.
Where do you draw the line? Personally I'd say that friending people you don't know definitely crosses the line. For some, clearly the line is drawn at sending anything remotely business related.
Did I carefully read the Facebook ten commandments before joining? No, I didn't. To a large extent my behaviour on Facebook is a product of my previous experiences of internet etiquette. If you have no previous knowledge of these semi-explicit rules it would be quite easy to commit a faux pas.
When I discovered this, my reporter's instinct kicked in.
Success as a reporter often depends more on who you know than what you know. Networking is a core skill. Networking is also Facebook's advertised purpose, so that's how I started using it.
Shocker.
This seems closer to the guy who used AI-magic to find people who'd tweeted about books and to tweet other recommendations to them. Both of them tried to pick people who seemed like they might be remotely interested.
If this is spam, it's a lite form of it, right?
I think it depends on whether your definition of how spammy something is has to do with relevance or permission. I tend to think that permission has a lot more to do with it.
If I sign up for a mailing list, I've given them permission to contact me. Even if they never send me something I care about, it's not spam (assuming that the email sent is related to what the list purported to be about).
If I have a personal friend who, as an inside joke, likes to send me links to penis enlargement sites, that's not spam, although if it's too common, he might find himself filtered out or not my friend any more.
If someone I have no other connection with decides to contact me with a commercial offer, that's spam. I haven't given them permission to send me that sort of thing. Even if the offer is relevant to me, it's still spam.
Signing up for Facebook pretty clearly gives people who you know to contact you with friend requests. It doesn't give random people trying to sell something that permission, so their doing so is spammy.
To sum up, if you get banned for adding too many friends too quickly regardless of whether or not you were spamming, i.e adding real friends then you're an idiot. Also, throwing a bitch-fit about how you left before you could get banned is silly, all it does is draw attention to you for being one of the people that are ruining Facebook for people who use it. For the record, I log on to Facebook approximately 15 minutes every couple months on average but I still find it annoying when people add you when the have no intention of being your friend.