FB users buying Oculus VR headsets to get customer service prioritization
npr.org
npr.org
October 2020 was the month before the US election, and the peak of both disinformation/influence campaigns, and of Facebook-the-website's efforts to combat those campaigns. So the spambot detector sensitivity was turned up to max that month, and if you tried to create a new account, there was a large chance you'd be mistaken for a bot and banned immediately. So a bunch of people who weren't Facebook users got fancy new VR headsets, tried to create Facebook accounts in order to be able to use them, and got immediately banned. The support department for Facebook-the-website was not at all up to the task of dealing with this. This kind of wrecked their product launch; instead of the press coverage and public reaction being about how great their hardware was, it was about all the people who couldn't use their hardware because of account issues.
So now Oculus has a completely separate support department for Facebook account issues, which acts less like it's supporting a free website and more like it's supporting a $300 piece of hardware. And if you have an account issue with the website, and you want to use that support department instead of the bad one, then buying a Quest 2 is not such a bad idea.
Intent matters a lot in law. Based on gp's description it definitely doesn't sound intentional, so it's probably fine from a legal point of view.
Facebook making Oculus worse might be bad for customers, but it's great for Oculus' competition, ain't it?
So, no risk of a Facebook monopoly here.
Facebook is also deep in bed with Qualcomm making Quest 2 work fully standalone and getting the XR2 SOC at a steep discount. Index and Reverb G2 require desktop PCs and high-end GPUs, and other companies using the same Qualcomm SOC have to pay full price.
Clearly a barrier that should have been there. He had no business being in the room and didn’t know how load balancing worked, even though he was asking me about it. Four strong hires and one no hire, which I know because the recruiter told me, so I could do the math. Also expressed no desire to fix it, so I sense it was an intentional move.
That was the last time I ever spoke to Facebook though I do appreciate the annual “hey, want to try again? for realsies this time?” email that tells me accept rate hasn’t recovered from the big crater I heard about. I’m glad it worked out the way it did but I wonder how many people got to experience that type of skillset mismatch as your orgs were merged.
I'm not near this kind of graphics but would you ever need SSH for that job? It seems unrelated.
As an example loading anything and everything, such as starting Maya, is done from the shell (different projects would have a myriad of different settings - usually stored in env vars), so picking up a few Linux skills can give your average artist some serious productivity (and hence career) gains. The work is often distributed globally - wanna check the state of something a bit non-standard in another site without transferring heaps of data over? There's a nice tool for that ;)
I recently got a Quest 2, and its been life changing. It's just an incredible product. I used a DK1 and DK2 back when they came out and the Quest 2 is like night and day. Everything is so much better. No screen door, wireless, plug and play, etc. I honestly didn't think VR would get to this point so quickly.
As for the life changing part, it's helping me work around some of my disabilities. Seems to be a common story in the VR space.
I know VR seems like a toy to many, but it really is changing people's lives. And I feel like modern VR started with Oculus.
So, from my heart, thank you.
BTW: if you are using your headset for exercise and want to give our open source VR fitness game a try you can check it out on AppLab https://quest.vrworkout.at
It's not a true game but an hand tracking based exercise game disguised as a bit of a game
Nobody is arguing that the Index isn't better (except for wireless-ness) but at 1/3 of the price, the Quest 2 is incredibly affordable and very, very nice.
And since you can play all the same PC VR games as the Index, plus Oculus-specific games, plus standalone Quest games... It's very versatile.
I have an OG Vive and just "upgraded" to the Quest 2 and it's hands-down better IMO.
I've upgraded my Quest 2 with some hand straps and the elite head strap, so that brings the price closer to 2/3 of the Index, and I still prefer it thanks to the standalone games and the wireless PC link. Not listening to the whine of the lighthouses is another small bonus.
Indeed. Because Valve values openness while Oculus (Facebook) values money. That's why Valve lets you play SteamVR games on Oculus, but Oculus does not let you play them on SteamVR (community solutions exist, of course).
This is pure evil.
It actually is one of the complaints I have about how Oculus does things, but since they basically ushered in this new era of VR, they pretty much had to have their own store and SDK. I can't fault them for not closing it, and nothing is stopping the developers from publishing on both.
Nothing except for the exclusivity contracts that Oculus pushes...
Do you also expect me to buy a Disney TV to watch Disney movies and a Marvel TV to watch Marvel movies? Or do you expect that all games, or movies, use the hardware you already own?
Personally, if it weren't for the Facebook account requirement I'd probably opt for a Quest 2. As it is, I don't think VR is worth the investment of an Index to me so I'll stick with my second hand not-updated-since-before-Oct-2020 Rift because it is perfectly adequate for Beat Saber.
If you actually want decent VR you need a beefy PC for both platforms. So that is a non-argument.
It’s a good story, at least.
With the last company whose customer service messed up badly, I reached out to the head of e-commerce for the company. I was nice and pleasant and explained the dilemma, but then he tried to pass the buck back to support which did not have the resources to solve the problem to which I replied "You're the head of e-commerce for company X, the buck stops with you. This is your problem to resolve. If you don't take ownership, I'm perfectly capable of escalating this issue myself, first to A, your CEO (personal cell number (xxx) xxx-xxxx and personal email foo@bar.com), then to B (...), C (...), or D (...) on the board of directors, then E, the CEO of the company that owns your company (...), and then F, who is on his board of directors (...) and happens to live 2 miles from me.".
...boom, problem resolved immediately. Not just for me but for other customers. Changes were made to their website within days. When warranted, you just have to go absolutely nuclear and make it clear as day that solving your problem personally is far cheaper than you escalating the the issue to anyone and everyone with power at the company whose customer service is jerking you around.
You have to make the cost of not providing customer service well the first time around so expensive that they don't see any other option than to invest in doing things right the first time.
I mean, seriously... buying people's personal contact details??
I know it's popular to diss the "karens" of the world, but a lot of them keep in check businesses that will abuse their customers if they can get away with it. They can be a useful corrective force just like class action lawsuits can be.
Corporations are conscience-lacking psychopaths, faceless cowards and abusers, and should be treated as such. They are cowards because they hide behind false appearances - the go-to method of dealing with their own shortcomings. And they are smart about it.
This point is beatifully driven home in a futuristic science-fiction novel "Accelerando" (which is free btw) where corporations based on smart contracts and AI threaten sentient beings uploaded into the net by publishing altered derivatives of public works to reposess unsuspecting readers's minds using copyright law.
It's a brutal power move, but it targets the people actually responsible and it clearly gets results. I think this is way better for everybody involved.
Of course it does depend on the person escalating being correct about the issue, and good and reasonable about explaining it to the person in charge. And we all know that's not going to be true for your average customer. So use this power with discretion.
Joe Public of course is usually well aware of this usage and doesn't actually think all people with these names are the sterotype they represent.
It is, and most of these memes keep some of the levity of their comedian origins. This particular meme seems unusually nasty and serious in comparison, but maybe it's just because it hurts someone close to me.
I suppose that doesn't change the fact it's a bit crappy for all the perfectly decent people called Karen out there. While I think this behaviour does need a good snarl word to call it out when it happens, perhaps "Karen" isn't it and we can do better.
I’m happy to go into more detail, and/or offer advice on better approaches if you sincerely want it.
I give companies a fair chance to do things right. I said two shots, but my actual heuristic is when a problem starts costing me 4 figures if I were billing for my time instead. Usually that's about two significantly frustrating customer service interactions with long wait times.
Just today I had to call customer service for an airline and the wait times were over 4 hours! I ended up getting around the wait time by calling their customer support number in another language I speak and being able to resolve the problem without hassle. But there is no planet where 4 hours wait times are acceptable and I feel bad for those whose only option was to call their English-only customer support number.
A theme of how you describe your interactions was to throw the support team under the bus, and/or highlight their failures to help you when interacting with an executive.
It's my experience that the executive has made intentional choices to deflect customer issues and that support team is their doing one way or another. Complaining about the support team to an executive will just put more pressure on the support team without granting them further support.
I'll get to a point in a minute :)
Another theme I see is one of using the system to your advantage. I have a fun similar airport story.
I knew my flight would get cancelled (weather) and I was about six hours early to the airport. I knew United had a partnership w/ Air Canada and the United staff wouldn't help me / the line was way too long because other flights already got cancelled. I went to the Air Canada desk and asked them to help since they had access to the same booking system. They told me to talk w/ United. While waiting in line again at United I called United on the phone and explained the situation and they immediately booked me an alternate flight on Air Canada that was direct to my destination, instead of through the one with bad weather. They also let me know that the Toronto airport I was in had a notorious rivalry between the staff of United and Air Canada where they constantly defer to the other team, supposedly because of spite.
So, my system.
Always take advantage of the system (non-human parts) - hit zero on the phone, try extensions if you dare.
My main approach when dealing with entry-level support people is to understand they have limited tools and their job is often to read a script that tries to get you to agree they helped. It's OK to deviate from that script, and if they can't help to ask to speak with a supervisor who can potentially offer a better option. When you move up the chain, it's important not to step on people on the way up. If they can't help you and you need to go around them by digging up the CEO via a cold call - I also think that's OK, but at that point you should be able to get what you want without throwing the failed support agent under the bus. If you want to give the executive advice, let them know that the support team seemed about as helpful as they could, but they didn't seem to have the training or support to offer you a fast resolution. Directly ask the executive to spend more time and effort investing in their support team and thinking of ways to offer improved support to avoid folks having to try to work around them. This frames it as a problem for the CEO to address with investment specifically, not one where they can just assume the support team did poorly and then go yell at a manager to improve morale with more beatings.
Anyways, always punch up is my rule. A second rule is to be deferential and try to take the blame for why you aren't getting what you want. This works exceptionally well at building empathy with support folks.
At one point in my life I missed about 50% of my flights, every time I'd be in line behind someone who complained about how slow security was, or the bag check, and they'd just get shut down. Every time I just asked if there was anything they could do to help me out given how absent minded I was for arriving late and not being prepared and I usually got the next flight out for free.
Anyways, punch up, use the system to your advantage, but don't direct your ire towards support teams when they fail. Also, if they've done a bad job it sends a better signal to fill out those NPS/CSAT surveys you get after the support interaction with a low score. This stuff will make it to execs, and comments that are left are often read thoroughly.
> A theme of how you describe your interactions was to throw the support team under the bus, and/or highlight their failures to help you when interacting with an executive.
I left out a lot of details, which I know means that a lot of assumptions will necessarily be made. I think you're reading into my comment something I didn't do. To give more details on the interaction. There was no phone support, only email and support took almost 2 weeks to response to my dilemma, which exceeded the response time expected by US Customs and the stuff I purchased was returned. They didn't respond to 3 additional requests within that two week period. When they finally responded, they couldn't solve the problem. The only real failure of the support team was that they were grossly understaffed. There's no reason for two week wait times, especially for a customer that just placed an order for multiple thousands of dollars which they charged the customer for when it was shipped, not delivered.
When I reached out to the executive to explain the problem. They only fault I gave to support was stating that they must be grossly understaffed if the response times were as long as they were. In my message, I placed the responsibility for fixing that particular issue of understaffing on the executive in question (head of ecommerce). Other issues that needed attention was how they were handling international fulfillment was causing them defects and costing them probably $100 or more per defect on shipments to the United States. I had already reached out to the partner company they worked with and was in contact with that company's United States CEO. Together we figured out the issue and I was relaying the fixes to the head of ecommerce for the company so he could fix the problem at the root because the buck stopped with him. I was solving a very real problem for them that was costing them money and I did all the research into the fix and provided the person who was ultimately responsible with fixes. I did this because I was trying to fix the problem myself during those two weeks before US customs sent my order back.
Passing the buck when it's your job and a customer has figured out the problem and handed you the solution on a silver platter is highly unprofessional.
Regarding your recomendation to use the system. It's a good one and one I'm familiar with. I use it often, but in my original example above I did not because the system in question had no interfaces to interact with besides a support email. There was no phone system, no chat system, not brick and mortar store, no support agents, etc. It was a system with a single interface that provided no interactivity (I can't dial 0 or ask to speak with the right person). The only interfaces available were that email address, US Customs and the shipping company.
Has there been interfaces that could be probed and exploited to solve the problem, yes, I totally agree with your approach.
I think we are on the same page and I hope if you ever run into a problem with a support team I’m close to that you let me know ASAP :)
Also my feeling on reading the grandparent comment is that they don't care about improving the support structure of the company, but rather find that bothering a C-level is the fastest way to get somebody important to send a "just get this sorted so this person stops bothering me" e-mail & have their support issue resolved - which I have to say I'm sympathetic to... whatever works for a customer to get their issue resolved, they have no interest in helping or hurting the support team.
http://consumerist.com/2007/05/11/how-to-launch-an-executive...
I've used this a few times myself. Again, after going through normal channels.
The mode where multiple executives are contacted (and perhaps a member or two of the press CC'd) is particularly effective as it plays off both internal office politics and the bad public relations spillover dynamic.
Remember too that such approaches aren't entirely self-serving. If you are having a specific issue, it's quite likely that many others are as well.
https://lifehacker.com/how-to-contact-executive-customer-ser...
I don't even care about the money so I won't sell it and probably will just throw it away. This killed this VR generation for me.
Technically it is awesome, would recommend everyone to try it at some point. But maybe spend a bit more for Valve or other hardware. There is lock-in too, but they don't make money with user data and have the superior environment.
The Quest series makes the cables go away and that is a big plus. While you can use the Steam VR while the Oculus environment is open, you will never get rid of the Facebook baggage. Hardware is indeed great, but hardware isn't everything.
Facebook has a corporate structure that simply will not prioritize any effort longer than 6 months unless a senior company executive (Mark, Sheryl) supports it. Even if it affects the bottom line - and there were plenty of examples where large customers could not spend significantly more money with Facebook because of software bugs - they won't do anything about it.
This is a way to help friends and family get their accounts fixed, and also to help make sure employees don't look at their friend and family's accounts with internal tools.
A few of those and you'd get a mostly functioning system.
I also think that, a service that is focused on helping those with personal connections to Facebook employees dampens the most potent source of visible friction for the maintainers of a system that clearly has the potential to be arbitrary and oppressive.
I think we would all be better off in a world where each oops case was solved by changing the overall system - even if we also recognize that change on that scale is difficult for then the most well intentioned.
It's amazing the number of systems which don't verify email before giving out an account.
I've taken control of:
Disney
DropBox
Redbox
...
But it gets worse!
Someone working at AT&T Mexico apparently decided to start entering my address as a placeholder when signing up customers that didn't have one. So I started getting phone bills -- with complete call histories -- for people all over Mexico. After several unsuccessful attempts to contact AT&T, I set up a filter to delete them.
Once a Spanish telecom did even worse, and populated seemingly their entire database with my address, so I'd get hundreds of phone bills all at once on the first of the month. I think they fixed it after two billing cycles.
Once a school in Chile made me an admin of their paid Zoom organization. I was actually unable to remove myself from their org or change the account's address, meaning I basically couldn't use Zoom until they removed me. (I'm unsure whether the school fixed it or Zoom fixed it after I made an angry tweet that went viral; whoever fixed it never bothered to follow up with me.)
The list goes on and on...
Wired even wrote an article about me. https://www.wired.com/story/misplaced-emails-took-over-inbox...
If you run a web service, PLEASE VERIFY ALL EMAIL ADDRESSES.
PS. Just now as I write this, someone in Spain scheduled an appointment for car service using my address. The e-mail contained a link to cancel the service, which I clicked. Oops.
If it was someone at Zoom: getting past the company's lawyers and PR people might have been too much of a barrier to bother.
Worst offender, by far, is Chilean companies. Total disregard of privacy practices. Almost none from Spain (GPDR effects I guess)
Don't remind me. I spent forever trying to figure out why I was still being charged for an Xbox account I'd already canceled. Turns out Microsoft had one account with the dot and one without.
First initial and last name it even worse. John, Jonathan, Julie, Jacob, James,and more all start with "J." I've gotten rental agreements, investment reports, appearance contracts, song demos, family pictures (not my family), and more.
You're so right.
This is a big reason I'm looking forward to Apple's iCloud+ custom domain names. Outlook.com already supports custom domain names for paying customers in a very limited way, but hopefully Apple's move will light a fire under Gmail product management to offer this, perhaps through Google One.
Other providers are moving beyond this, i.e. offering custom domains to a wider set of (paying) users. Outlook.com already supports this in a limited way (domain must be with GoDaddy, kind of silly), for Microsoft 365 Family and Individual users. And Apple is apparently going to offer it to everyone as part of iCloud+ too.
Not everyone needs the full Workspace offering. In fact Google has Google One for exactly that kind of customer, and a custom domain name would fit neatly into the Google One proposition.
And because Gmail treats that dot differently else I have some interesting cases like where I have 2 Instagram accounts under my email, one with it and one without, and it's not always clear which one the email is for until I expand the details. I have been tempted to log in and shut these down, but I'm pretty sure that is illegal. However some sites require me to log in to unsubscribe or contact support so into the spam they go.
Ehh. Intent matters a lot. I'm not saying someone couldn't go after you, but as long as you weren't actively trying to make off with their data or impersonate them I think you'd be in the clear.
Imagine you got such an email and were confused. So you went to log in but couldn't. So you reset the password in confusion. That's not illegal, it's a very reasonable response to being notified of an account that you don't remember creating. If contacting the service provider fails, closing the account would seem to be the only remaining reasonable course of action. It's not your fault the service provider doesn't verify things.
Amazon
A few years ago my dad got an email saying he'd bought something on Amazon, using an account none of us had created. Turned out someone used his email address to make a purchase. We reset the password and logged in. It looked like a legit purchase and seemed plausible, based on the person's name (we saw the shipping location), that it could have been a mistake.
I doubt it would be an issue in practice though. Far more likely is that you might inadvertently get caught up in a ban from the service due to the illicit content being linked to the account you recovered which would now be linked back to your metadata (IP address & etc) since you recovered it which would in turn link to your regular account.
My email address has a very particular custom domain that can't be explained with a typo, and I don't know anyone in Texas. Very weird. Netflix support was like, whatever, why do you care?
Still puzzled about why and how that happened.
I thought all the emails were spam, until one day I realized they seemed pretty legit. I went to FB directly, forgot password, and had to use Google translate until I could switch the interface to English. I tried to delete the account, but got locked out. It took a lot of effort to get FB to delete that account.
My FB friends never once offered oops. How sad.
It happened to me. Those 24h were no fun.
I’m intrigued at all the stuff that falls off the wagon just because it isn’t a three month initiative or would need to cross a quarter to be done.
To be fair, many companies have some degree of this. They don't want to commit significant resources to something the people in charge don't understand.
One of the nice thing about my time in government was that there were no review cycles, just a project to be done. Granted, there were many other problems and we cut corners to meet artificial (and in the end irrelevant) deadlines imposed from above, but the central project never got derailed.
I have seen company Facebook pages automatically deleted by an algorithm with no warning and vague reasoning that there are other similar pages. There is almost zero support to help and what support is there is unable to do anything.
I need not tell this forum, but if you have a company, do not rely on Facebook as your business page. Take the time to setup a proper website and use Facebook for promotion if you must.
If you are a user of the Facebook platform I wouldn’t ever put my money into the platform in any way.
It also makes for shitty service quality around the end of June and December, as people rush to push things to prod. (I've heard this may have changed, but it's hard to notice good service quality).
(Former FB employee)
After lots of escalation through some personal contacts we fortunately had, they switched to a system where they're apparently now using "AI" to determine the credit line every client has dynamically, which doesn't work for us as our campaigns are very big and very short (products that are only relevant for a couple of weeks, but benign, nonpolitical content if you want to ask).
Still nobody can tell us how big the AI thinks our credit limit will be at any given point in time. Finding out who is responsible for anything is a hot mess, and by now we're spending seven digits per month.
But to me, the cream of the crop is how many times we had to escalate to FB to literally beg them to be able to spend our money with them. It's ridiculous.
Amazon, on the other hand have amazing customer support so much so that even if you think the company is terrible on a moral level you probably still suggest it to friends.
I am sympathetic to the argument though. Getting locked out of your existing Gmail account could be really disastrous. Maybe there should be regulation for email extrication — if you’re going to ban me, you better allow me to update all of my accounts to not use your email service first.
The big players in search, email, social have a larger market share than the big car producers. There's no 'Google' or 'Facebook' of cars.
If you get banned from using your Gmail, you can't just switch to Hotmail.
Using your car analogy: If Honda provides me a car for free, I don't expect them to allow me to do whatever I want with the car that I don't own.
As for the stuff in the car, it's a poor analogy. The stuff in your Gmail account is easy to duplicate, unlike physical stuff, and it's your responsibility to back it up.
As you can guess, I don't use free email services, and I don't rely on the mail always being in the hands of a provider - I always have my own copy via IMAP. This was the normal way to do email, and the barrier to entry is low - most people doing this in those days were not tech folks.
It's just silly to demand that a company spend money to provide something to you for free, and then demand they be treated as a utility. Especially where plenty of alternatives exist.
> One cannot live without a utility...
If my water got shut off, my life would go on pretty normally - drinking water is cheap in stores, bars are required to provide it free of charge and I can shower at a friend's place or something. If I lost my email account however, I'd have months of work ahead of me just to restore my digital life to its previous state and my livelihood would be at risk. All bills go to my email so I couldn't pay for the services I and my business need, business partners wouldn't be able to reach me, neither would my customers... In fact, I can't really think of any other single thing that would cause more problems if lost than my email account(s).
When Twitter was the only way to get updates on my passport application was when these platforms became utilities to me.
Imagine trying to run a small business without access to either Facebook, Google, or both. Business owners whose operations have been inadvertently banned have written about it at length; it appears to cause serious issues.
For all of the things that could ruin me if lost/stolen (government ID, bank accounts, phone number...), I have an automatic last-resort strategy of getting in a car, driving to a place and annoying someone in-person enough to get my problem solved. But email is the only exception.
I've tried looking for providers in my country, but they all went out of business around the time gmail launched. So now my only options are international megacorps with no support for anyone without 100k twitter followers or small companies with offices on the other side of the continent.
An ideal system would of course allow you to truly take your address with you to another provider and sever any link to your old one, just like you can with your phone number. The current semantics of email addresses don't allow that or require you to own your own domain name, which given the sad state of the business end of the DNS, isn't feasible on a large scale either.
The other is provided by a large company, again in a (semi) competitive marketplace, but is totally unregulated and can kick you out at any time. They don't let you migrate your email address, and you can't send or receive mail to/from it if the company throws you into a Kafka loop.
It strikes me the anomaly is that email service isn't forced to be portable and delivered as a baseline utility, with "send on behalf of" and "forward without looking at or storing" as non commercial, non charged functionality that must be offered indefinitely, so a user can port their mail if they move away from a provider.
When looked at this way, I don't see the difference between mobile service and email - mobile providers don't enjoy a monopoly, but are regulated and need to deliver portability free of charge.
Much of what you say is not true with email in general. I own my own domain and I absolutely can take my email address anywhere.
Also, keep in mind that people typically pay for phone service. I do not think you can demand portability if a company provides you a phone number for free (which some do).
If you want portability for email, buy your own domain.
It's way more important than Google and Facebook.
Or to give another example that lighter in regulation than food: shoes.
As for me, my Rift sits unused in a box. The Oculus desktop software may be the worst piece of shit I've ever used and I can't lay eyes on it without wishing ill upon its developers.
I had gotten the original oculus because I was afraid of missing out on oculus exclusives, but I would only really miss super hot. (I also don’t understand how they shipped the new oculus without the eye spacing adjuster; my partner and I have different settings for it and get dizzy using the wrong one)
Formerly one of those developers, finally got fed up with the beast and left. I continue to do VR dev.
1. The internals were actually some of the most robust software I've ever seen.
2. People who worked on it originally were some of the best devs I've ever seen across multiple companies
3. They uniformly got burnt out by incredible harassment from people who hated facebook transferring their hate to people who cared about games or VR - or, ironically, wanted to transition away from the facebook teams...because facebook.
4. Don't ascribe to developers what was clearly forced commandments from deeply flawed leadership decisions.
Those people doing the forcing in #4 are the first in line for blame. Not the developers. Maybe a little sprinkling of people similar to you.
Same, and that is also why I recommend the same to anyone who discusses VR: Do not buy Oculus.
I'm sorry you had to work there and saw your work get ruined by corporate greed, and I'm sure that you personally hold no blame for this, but that doesn't make the product as it exists today any less awful.
I draw the line at "wishing ill upon its developers". Yeah, we were a part of the beast and responsible for its output. And I did quit, as the sibling comment failed to notice in its blunt anger. Login was beyond controversial even amongst my peers.
My point was: If, as a critic of Oculus, you look for someone to feel a dull sense of non-actionable vengeance against, aim higher.
I left and my headset of choice is an Index, despite its software having much rougher edges.
That's where your money comes from.
Even if your internals were indeed "some of the most robust software" ever, your users didn't see the internals, they just saw the ads.
Even if you were (are) one of the "best devs" ever, you know the software equivalent of Michelangelo cannot be appreciated by anyone except another really good programmer, and there aren't that many of those, and they certainly aren't your users. Your users saw ads.
You cannot work for Facebook and enjoy that sweet sweet Facebook money, without having to accept, that everyone else you meet, will treat you like you sell ads, because that's what you do.
If you don't want to sell ads? Quit.
I have to manually use task manager to kill all its processes and the service when I'm done with it or it will constantly wake up, cause 2 of my monitors to momentarily blank while it does something, and prevent my computer from sleeping.
On start it always asks me to confirm the storage location, and then complains that it isn't available anyway.
The library keeps forgetting that I have Beat Saber and I'm forced to launch it through Steam instead.
The only game I actually "purchased" in the Oculus store, Sensor Bounds ($0 tool), is considered to be uninstalled and can't be downloaded due to above mentioned "storage location" issue.
Again, I have intentionally avoided updating this since Facebook instituted the account requirement so it might be better now.
Same story with AI lockouts at Google. Even if you do have access to "someone at Google" good luck getting a clear answer of what happened or how to fix the issue.
GitLab recently said that customer support will not help restore access to your account if you lock yourself out unless you have an active subscription to your account and can use your billing details as verification.
How should google support handle this? Perhaps banks should offer an identify verification service?
I’ve seen a lot of threads on Google issues. Never heard of this. Thanks.
It is not reasonable to have every service have it's own identity verification venue in every city so it would have to be centralized some how.
I would challenge that assumption. There are countless stories of ISPs, carriers, Sony, etc handing over someones account to a hacker because the hacker called up and said they were locked out. How do you verify someone who has called up on the phone to see they are the real owner of the account and not the person who knows the current password?
I would rather have maximum security on my account. 2FA, other methods of verification. And if I get locked out I get locked out. Hopefully the account would be set up to self destruct after n months inactivity. I can create a new account and upload my backups. I would much rather this than allowing some random tech support person hand over my account to someone on the phone.
There is also the "You get what you pay for" thing. Support costs money and people are not paying for Facebook. I pay for a Google One subscription and this gives me access to customer support. I also do a monthly data dump using Google Takeout so I am prepared to either create a new google account or move to an alternative platform if my account is locked.
Getting locked out and having no one access my account is far preferable to having someone else given access to my account.
Utterly insane that this is not possible.
I think there will be problems with every solution, but this one would probably resolve a lot of tnem.
A new one shows up and takes over the account, permanently locking out the old one. All in 20 minutes?
In Canada the postal service offers this. You can show your ID at any post office and be verified. Sounds pretty convenient.[1]
1. https://www.canadapost-postescanada.ca/cpc/en/business/posta...
Not sure if you mean specifically the google+bank case but that's a thing in my country, it's called "bank identity".
I file my taxes and social security forms (and can access my covid tests records) while my bank vouches for my identity, i.e. I have to go through their regular internet banking login + 2FA.
A very recent example was Droid script app on Android:
I think this guy just figured out the “customer” part of “customer service”. This, I think, illustrates the issue with Facebook well.
https://www.oculus.com/quest-2/removable-facial-interface-al...
I am an avid Quest 2 user since ~October. I play Population:one and _love_ it. It's a team-based Battle Royale. I am just blown away by how much fun and social it is. It's been a godsend during the pandemic.
The Quest 2 is only $300 - I strongly recommend it!
But there is no way to switch between these options, or even to upgrade the consumer hardware you had to buy to get stuff out of the door when they launched without this functionality to be able to utilise the business accounts, even if you were willing to pay to do so. The answer is literally to junk your existing hardware investment.
It's really a crazy mess. Nobody at Facebook/Oculus seems to really care about how this is supposed to work for businesses developing for the platform in practice.
It seems so much harder than just permitting business users to set up a "faux" account that can be used for company wide demo machines (and managed only by signing into that account, not having to buy specific hardware), even if a bunch of verification was required for that initial setup.
What Oculus requires, however, is your Facebook account, as in the one you created over a decade ago and never use but is full of all your friends' pictures of their children and/or political memes.
Creating a separate account just for using the hardware is not only expressly forbidden, but can result in you being locked out of your device: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/oculus-quest-2-users-banne... And if you truly do not have an existing account, good luck convincing the algorithms of that.
The trick is, on the first session upload a profile photo or two or three, and actually friend a few people.
YMMV
Here's one from a few days ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/ouubx1/deleted_face...
Or this from a week ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/osbbkj/i_lost_my_en...
I'm not one to defend Facebook, but what you've said is just not true. That only happened to a handful of people at the very beginning and was likely a moderation bug. People aren't getting banned for having burner accounts.
https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/search?q=banned&restrict_sr=...
The TOS expressly allows them to lock you out of your account if they detect you using an account that is not your Facebook Real Identity (tm)
They are allowed to brick your Oculus at any time, with no recourse.
See "I want to use a name different from my legal name for my Facebook account." Here https://support.oculus.com/fb/
And "If I’m having problems accessing my Facebook account, can I still use my Oculus device?" here https://www.oculus.com/blog/facebook-accounts-on-oculus/
https://www.facebook.com/help/112146705538576/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_real-name_policy_cont... https://www.wired.com/2015/06/facebook-real-name-policy-prob... https://media.business-humanrights.org/media/documents/files...
Wow. That is despicable.
And even if they have not yet, they can at any time and all of your games and hardware get locked which is permitted in their ToS. Why would you want to take this risk when the alternative platforms do not have real identity rules.
For people who don't care about the account they made a decade ago and no longer use, this seems like a reasonable and probably safe approach.
However, you must link it to your facebook account that is connected to your true friend graph, and they can deactivate your account at any time.
I highly recommend that no one buy one.
Seriously, this sounds super-entitled to me.
Why is this unfair?
Also, the advertising supported-model has so many negative consequences. Pragmatically, FB isn't just going to fade away, so wouldn't it be better if they evolved towards a paid model? (Or at least the option to pay.)
I have backups of many but not all.
Lots of tears. Turns out almost all of her friends have lost their original accounts.
Even as a Facebook employee, there was nothing I could do to help (I joined Facebook after leaving this startup, but still wanted to help because I founded it). Even determining the cause of the ban could have cost me my job (for good reason, don't want corruption and bribery, etc).
I understand the need to be cautious, but based on my analysis at the time the false positive rate was over 5% for this particular rule (based on later reactivations). Seemed way to high considering my startup had spent over 50K on FB ads in the connected account.
But, the inner QA in me wants to file a ticket and hunt down a fix. It bugs me in the back of my mind. I’ve tried searching for a fix, but nobody seems to have the same exact issue. I’ve tried uninstalling both apps and reinstalling in various orders to no avail.
I wish I could just call or chat with support and get a meaningful conversation going with someone who could actually help (as opposed to reading from a script).
Sounds like I need to buy an Oculus.
Now life is more “normal”, it’s very difficult to meet someone in a bar/club and tell them you don’t have Instagram, Facebook or WhatsApp without sounding dodgy. Sad reality I’ve found as a 25 year old single man in London.
People are starting to come around as they and their family members start to have more acutely negative experiences with social media.
I also LOVE my quest 2. FB isn't perfect but hating it is getting boring now.
The real moral I guess is, set up 2FA and maybe that trusted recovery person feature, whatever they call it.
Just like how movie tickets and train tickets don't get any cheaper with advertisement everywhere.
The users who have any clue what 2FA is are not the ones getting their account hacked. They are the 60+ year olds who use Facebook as their only contact with friend and family, unfortunately.
How can that be possible? Surely either the bank incorrectly trusts the hacker in which case it's the bank's error and they'll refund any stolen money, or the customer gave Facebook his secret bank credentials but that seems pretty weird and unlikely.
At least that's how it is in my country. Banks have simple obvious rules that you have to follow and then you're never on the hook for stolen money. Basically don't give your PIN number or password to anyone. You don't need to worry about all the complicated vulnerabilities that you do with websites which don't take responsibility for their security.
(I mean... the Quest 2 is probably being sold at a loss with the idea that it'll help make money from ads... but also, the game store, which is not as icky as their privacy-destroying ad business.)
>As I've tried to explain many times (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...), there are two problems: (1) real abuse is happening on the internet; and (2) internet users frequently imagine that they're seeing such abuse when in reality they are merely seeing something they dislike. Both problems are serious, but for entirely different reasons, and we need to be careful not to confuse them, since (2) is extremely common, indeed is the laziest internet production that exists. Allowing people to do #2 everywhere (so to speak) could easily destroy the community.
>Fortunately, a simple rule turns out to suffice: don't post accusations of abuse unless you have some bit of evidence to go on. Someone else having a different view than you does not count as evidence. You need at least a shred of something objective, and if you don't have that, then you can't post accusations. Since the overwhelming majority of #2 posts have no evidence, that rules them out. Getting people to actually follow this rule is a different issue of course.
What compelling evidence do you have?
I love my Oculus device (life changing indeed as someone else put it in the thread above) and detest Facebook. Is it that hard to believe other people might be in a similar situation?
> I care but I have a quest because there's no alternative, if there is one day I'll jump ship without looking back.
I tried this on my own account shortly after and, sure enough, there's no waiting period where previous emails remain allowed to reset passwords.
But yeah not sure how many support request they're getting considering that spam accounts are popping up every day
Yes and the reason you should delete.
Google sorta does this through Google One, it's 2-3$ a month and you also get some extra storage space. It's not perfect but you actually get to talk to a real human being.
4chan post
This video would verify Tom Cruise: https://youtu.be/iyiOVUbsPcM
Just curious.
FB buying Oculus feels exactly like that for VR.
Oculus is far far ahead of where any VR developers thought it would be in 2021. In January of 2019 the Rift was still running on cables connected to a $2000 laptop and confined to a 5x5ft square play area with 7 foot tall poles holding scanners on each corner,also plugged into the same computer. If you wanted to experience VR, you had to have all those things and set them up.
Now for $300 I can (and have) experience VR on a beach with no Internet or electricity for a couple hours.
The opinion of most VR developers I know is that Facebook have unequivocally advanced VR headset progression more than any other company and better than we couldve ever hoped.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/virtual-reality-rich-white-kid-o...
[2] https://twitter.com/kentbye/status/1421545550407630849?s=19
Honestly they're the only players in the industry treating it as more than a hobby and the only viable headset for mass consumers. I think without their pressure Valve would have never bothered with the Index or HL:Alyx.