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Comment by soulclap | Hacker News Reader

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.)

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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.

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