Facebook takedown followup: what happened and what FB needs to fix | Hacker News Reader

Facebook takedown followup: what happened and what FB needs to fix

arstechnica.com

49 pointsgrellas17 comments

I am glad to read this part: "We plan to continue pressing Facebook on this issue, but in the meantime, keep sending in your horror stories. We're sure there are plenty more out there." I was very worried they would get their stuff fixed, and ignore the issue afterwards.

This sucks and everything, but this is just the kind of garbage you're going to have to put up with when you put such an emphasis on using a proprietary social networking site as your main presence online for yourself or your organization. Now, imagine you were also using Facebook for all of your communication (chat, messaging, forum, group, etc) needs. You'd also be out of all of those services until and unless they restored them for you.

This is why my advice remains: Do what people have done for almost twenty years. Make a website. Do your stuff on your website. If you have anything worth while, people will come to your website. Stop handing the keys to the internet over to Facebook both by using their services directly or spamming your own site and uglifying it with Facebook Everything widgets.

Using Facebook as your web presence strikes me as about as professional and makes you look about as serious as using Angelfire or Geocities, anyway.

Agree with everything you said. But besides that, Facebook is so huge right now that you are basically forced to 'represent' on there as well.

Someone in the comments on the first Ars Technica article wrote that Facebook took down the page for one of their websites (a wiki) and they lost loads of visitors because of that, never recovered, closed it down.

And yes, it is 'bad' and given those events 'not smart' to rely on Facebook for bringing in your visitors. But that's where they are at these days. And Facebook just 'randomly' killing pages, accounts, content is just messed up.

My point is basically: you can't really avoid/ignore Facebook if you want to get your name out there. (Sure, this might not apply to everyone but you get it.)

I don't think I buy the argument everyone makes about a Facebook presence being obligatory. Are we to believe that the only way people hear of new sites and services is through Facebook? If that's true, then how do people hear about your Facebook page, to begin with? Or is it that they'll supposedly only interact with your site or service if it's via Facebook? You don't need a Facebook page for people to pass your URL around or mention it in their wall feed thing.

If the idea is that people will no longer bother going to a website or surfing the web in general unless "facebook.com" is somewhere in the URL and/or that they will only communicate with you via forums, wall posts, messaging on Facebook itself and nowhere else, then . . . well, I give up. That's not a world in which I want my service or site to exist and I'd rather not do it at all than do it as some sort of trivial Facebook Serf on their land, by their rules, and with their citizens. If we've come to the point that the entire success and popularity of a service and its continued lifeblood is owed to existing on and interacting via Facebook, then we should wave the white flag and admit we have lost the internet.

I completely agree with your original post. Relying entirely on Facebook is foolish as they have complete control. On the other hand, ignoring Facebook is also foolish. People share links, and for major news sources/outlets will continue to do so but there's a lot of value in being present on a social network.

I think the smart thing to do is to take precautions. Host your content and auto-post it to Facebook, Twitter, etc. You should also have some way to contact your users/fans directly so that if things like this happen you can notify them.

I can definitely see Facebook being an additional tool, the same way buying ads on AdSense is. I just think that if one is losing all of their traffic and community because something happened to their social networking element, they're doing something seriously wrong. The goal of the Facebook presence should be to funnel people into the real service or community or information on the real site and not to supplant it (and once they're on the real site, not to have all your services like forums handled by Facebook Connect service widgets which places you in a similar situation, too).

I'm speaking from limited experience, of course, and with a service that established itself long before social networking even existed. I think the premise is still sound, though.

Getting people to visit your site/using your service regularly would be best case, of course. But compare that to all the blogs in your feed reader, do you visit (all of) them unless there is a new post up? Probably not.

In a similar way, a lot of people (many of them not willing to put up with things like 'feed readers') are probably on Facebook like 'all the time' and will only drop by and check your site if they see some activity on your Facebook page. In other words: Facebook is like their feed reader or news aggregator. And all of a sudden, Facebook comes along and completely removes your feed...

I'd say currently 'we' have lost quite a big part of it, unfortunately. And while I would never wave the white flag, I think we can agree that a lot of people, businesses and 'hobby projects' are kind of 'screwed' when Facebook makes their pages or content disappear.

And just to make that clear: I never liked Facebook although I have been active in many many online communities throughout the years. But Facebook just feels too corporate, serious and overall 'not cool' to me, meaning it's hardly any fun. I just want to express that they have got a lot of influence these days and the way they are going on about certain things can cause serious damage.

I don't think a facebook presence if obligatory, but really is well advised if you want to reach a portion of the net-using public that sees facebook as _the_internet_.

If you skip FB, you're skipping a lot of eyeballs potentially. If you get those eyeballs, it's up to you to keep them interacting directly sans-facebook afterwards.

Hey look, it was DMCA! Like I said it was... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2493798

For all those people trolling around complaining, the real complaint should be that illegal DMCA takedown requests are rarely followed up on in court. (In other words, Ars would do society better by suing whoever made their content get taken down.)

You mean suing a bogus email address sent by a random Internet troll? Yeah, that's what they need to do.

From what I understand you file a counter notice, then in 14 days Facebook is on the hook.

From ChillingEffects.org the service provider is then required to restore the material Not sure how forceful required is.

Here's an idea: Facebook should require users filing a DMCA takedown request to have a Facebook account -- and send the requester's profile to the person/organization the claim is against.

That's not part of the law. If someone wants to fax or mail in a takedown request to Facebook, they have to comply with that too.

As several people have mentioned in these topics, the only real issue is Facebook's failure to handle counterclaims properly. That's how the DMCA is supposed to work. You file a copyright infringement claim, the host takes down the material. I file a counterclaim, the host puts the material back up, and it's up to you to sue me.

If they just responded promptly to counterclaims, the hand-wringing about bogus claims is mostly irrelevant.

This article is all about the problems with Facebook's process, but the thing I found most telling wasn't mentioned. Facebook issued a statement to ReadWriteWeb before contacting Ars as to why their page was taken down or restoring it. They prioritized saving face above dealing with the effected.

The problem isn't process, the process is a symptom of not caring about their users.

I think that's just a case of one arm of the octopus (PR) being faster and better at their job than another arm (copyright and trademark violations). It doesn't mean the process isn't still broken, but I doubt their PR team is hooked up to work on the copyright issues anyways.

I 'm happy for you ars technica and imma let you finish, but there are much more serious issues that facebook refuses to address. For example, look at this older post about how facebook irrationally banned adsense from their apps and refuses to respond to developers' complaints for more than 2 months now:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2291336

Reply on news.ycombinator.com