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Comment by jnovek | Hacker News Reader

As frustrating as this is 100% of problems I’ve encountered with Google or Facebook in my career have been solved with professional network connections into those companies. OP, I encourage you to examine your network and see if you are connected to FB in a useful way. If you have investors, use them. This is what they’re for.

The only other method I’ve seen work is to make noise in the media and hope someone at Facebook/Google notices. It’s a total crapshoot but sometimes it seems to come out OK.

I’m guessing that this post is an attempt at the latter.

Edit: Oh, and, stop trying to analyze your users without their consent! You’d be surprised how giving early adopters are when you show them a little trust.

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Has anyone with plenty of contacts at FAANG companies ever thought to leverage those contacts into a business? As in... Can't get a response from Google/Facebook, etc? Tell us (the helpful folks at WeHaveSomeCloutWithFBAndGoog.com) about your problem, and we'll get in touch with someone who can (hopefully) provide a remedy!

We were just look who, among our followers had more followers on their own so we could contact them and suggest an affiliate model for them.

This information is available in their profile so we were not trying to sneak on anybody's data

It’s not safe to assume that putting information into a profile means that they want it be utilized in a programmatic search or be collected off-site for marketing use.

Users have a wide range of potential motivations for using IG. I know a good cross-section of startup founders and another cross-section of artists and the use-case and expectations for both groups is wildly different!

Further, many IG users are simply using it as the latest iteration of Facebook. Scraping personal information — even if it’s exposed in their profile — might feel like a violation of the relationship they expect to have with a vendor in IG.

This is just, like, my opinion, man.... and I don’t know if it can work for your business but if you find your way out of this mess I encourage you to look at it more from the perspective of users who engage heavily with you, not users who have the most leverage. A subset of your engaged users will also have a lot of leverage.

You want your evangelists to evangelize because they really believe in you. You can manage a relationship with a small number of good evangelists personally rather than through a soulless mass E-Mail (or whatever medium you might use).

A rev share (like you were trying to do) is great but you want to think about it like you’re supporting your key evangelists and reducing their friction in talking about what you’re working on.

Best of luck! I hope you sort things out.

jnovek, this is what we do. We create relationships, but this is not opposite with understanding who your audience is.

Probably our biggest mistake is that we are not familiar with these kind of tools and did not know the danger (we did check reviews of the service, of course but they were not helpful as you see).

Anyways, I appreciate your suggestions. We will indeed be more careful from now on.

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