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Comment by jonathanstrange | Hacker News Reader

My take on this and other stories like this is that you really should never ever use a company like Facebook as a vital component of your business. There have been so many stories about this, just browse Reddit forums and other sources for experiences with Facebook's Kafkaesque advertising manager, for example. It can work for years and suddenly your account is cancelled. It's fine to use such companies and their services as one leg of a business with many legs, but never rely on them solely.

This is just a matter of common sense. The same applies to Amazon, Youtube, etc. Even if they're fine now they can and will unilaterally change their conditions and employ algorithms with false positives. Your business can become the victim of algorithmic discrimination and plain old bugs anytime.

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Facebook is my e-commerce business' main avenue of customer acquisition. It wouldn't make any sense to avoid using something that is clearly a profoundly valuable asset because something could go wrong at some point. Even if they shut off my access tomorrow, I've still gained the thousands of customers who I acquired - they've already generated a profit for me, and I can keep reaching out to them via marketing emails to make more sales.

Same thing with Amazon - it's been one of the easiest ways to sell. I listed my stuff, spent a little on ads, and things have just been slowly and steadily up and to the right since then. Even if they kicked me off tomorrow, I've still made good money in a very time-efficient manner.

It's one thing to say you should get Fastmail instead of Gmail, but to just say you should avoid using services that are valuable for your business because you might lose access later is cutting off your nose to spite your face.

I think there is a slight nuance to what they wrote. They said, "you really should never ever use a company like Facebook as a vital component of your business." It sounds like FB and Amazon, while immensely valuable for you, are not 'vital'.

A typical ecommerce business that advertises on Facebook might bring in 30% or more of their new customers through that channel. That's "vital".

EVERY direct-to-consumer ecommerce company buys Facebook and Google ads. Every single one.

If you lose the access, does your company die? If not, is not "vital".

Yes. These companies will die without Google and Facebook ads. Not immediately mind you, but after 6-12 months of near-zero new customer acquisition they will be out of business.

They didn't say "avoid", just don't put all your eggs into one basket.

> you really should never ever use a company like Facebook as a vital component of your business.

Like Facebook - by which you mean Facebook, Google and Twitter, I suppose?

So what are you supposed to do, exactly? Hand out fliers door to door? Create your own social network?

These large corporations have inserted themselves into every single part of our lives as a gatekeeper. They believe that they have no responsibility to actually treat their clients with fairness, and they have made sure of that by having no way to actually reach anyone who can change anything. And yet for a small business, they have no choice.

The system was designed entirely by these big companies to make sure that these big companies could do exactly as they pleased, giving us no recourse except legal action.

What you are doing is called blaming the victim and it isn't very nice. Morally, ethically, _and legally_, this system is wrong. Facebook is the villain here, not this man who used Facebook in exactly the way they advertise to us to do so.

I'm not blaming anyone, I'm advising people not to introduce single points of failure into their business. You need to either ensure that any dependencies can be replaced easily (which is hard) or diversify these dependencies in a way that failure of one of them is not catastrophic. For example, if you rely on advertising you need to diversify to Facebook, Google, Bing, Amazon, and other online advertisers instead of relying on only one of them. As I've said, it's common sense, so my apologies for stating the obvious.

It's common sense and obvious, yet whenever it gets mentioned, the messenger gets dunked on for victim blaming or whatever. Nobody's saying "don't use Facebook for your business". Rather, it's "Don't utterly rely on Facebook for your business to function (or on any other free service where you don't have a formal business arrangement with)." Somehow, this is a controversial opinion on HN.

Please educate me on how to get the potential clients to switch platforms that they use to view pictures?

Advertising only works if you advertise where the potential clients are. In my industry that means Instagram. I also do use Google ads and youtube, but the return there is a drop in the bucket compared to instagram, literally a rounding error.

Back in the real world they MUST. Small business is done on LinkedIn, Facebook, Amazon, the like.

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