Hacker News Reader

Comment by marcomonteiro | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com