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Comment by blatherard | Hacker News Reader

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blatherard·

> The move will significantly reduce the risk of building on the Facebook platform.

What's to stop them from reversing the policy change? Once bitten, twice shy.

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They put an enforceable promise in there that they wouldn't do that. Wait no, they could have but didn't.

Why would a company ever impose binding restrictions on itself?

When they’ve already burned their reputation and need to convince portential partners that they won’t do it again.

I can’t think of any real world examples, though. So this is all hypothetical.

It's a PR move. Probably proposed by one of many third party agencies that Sandberg 'wasn't aware of but takes full responsibility for'.

I think it's more likely this is to avoid problems with the slew of dating apps that depend on Facebook now that they're starting to roll out their dating feature.

To convince customers that they're not just trying to trick them?

Hypothetically, or in the specific case of facebook?

Companies imposing binding restrictions on themselves is vital to loads of types of business. An insurance company binds themselves to pay out if you make a valid claim, for example.

To ward off government regulation.

Well basically every company releasing code under an open source or free software license does so it is quite common. I guess the answer to the "why?" is the same as always: they believe doing so is more valuable than not doing so.

Or "eating your lunch". You make something that overlaps with FB functionality, but people use it instead of the FB version because it works better/has additional features. You make some $$ and all is well. Then FB takes a look and says "Hmm, we should add those features." Now no one needs to use your version anymore.

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