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Comment by magduf | Hacker News Reader

If email worked this way, the whole thing would collapse, because much of the time, you really do want to receive messages from new people. How would contacting a business work if their email system auto-rejected all messages from people not already known?

Sure, spam is a big problem, and that's why we've invented spam filters. Google was able to do that and it works well. Granted, Google is a huge company with lots of resources, but so is Facebook, so why can't they be bothered?

>Don't use it to message strangers, it's very explicitly not what the platform is designed for.

Wrong, it's designed to help people get in contact with each other. This doesn't mean everyone wants to be friends first before exchanging some messages.

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This is what friend requests are for.

I don't want unsolicited messages from people. It's bad enough for me on LinkedIn, where that's the whole point.

When I still maintained a FB account, I had very few friends, basically family plus 2-3 others. I didn’t like the privacy problems.

Not everyone uses the tool the same way you do.

Tools don't exist in a vacuum. When a tool is a closed platform driven by a business, that business is going to heavy-handidly steer how the tool is used.

It isn’t always socially appropriate to friend request people, which is why I rarely do it (because I have no idea what the other person’s expectations are). If I’ve been introduced to a total stranger via Messenger, I don’t necessarily want to (nor should I have to) be their “friend” just to have them see my messages.

I guess I just have completely different use cases. Why would I want to read Facebook messages from complete strangers?

If I don't want them to be Facebook friends, then I'll give them my email.

> If email worked this way, the whole thing would collapse, because much of the time, you really do want to receive messages from new people.

Of course. But Facebook isn't e-mail. A closed system that thrives on heavily weighted social graphs is just nothing like an open standard for arbitrary message exchange.

> Wrong, it's designed to help people get in contact with each other.

Based on what? Have you used Facebook? Everything they do is about building and establishing communities, that's their business and they know it. They do almost nothing to help strangers communicate one-off. We are literally in the middle of a discussion about how Facebook gives low priority to messages from strangers, which is evidence that they have this mentality.

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