Someone Stole Sherlock's 300,000 Likes
spottedsun.com
spottedsun.com
You didn't own a website here. You didn't write code, you didn't set up servers, and you didn't sit around worrying about whether you were monetizing well enough to keep the site from imploding under its own popularity. You volunteered to be the curator of an entry in a database owned by a multi-billion-dollar company, you took an abnormal amount of pride in your work, and after a few years they decided your services were no longer needed.
You are owed nothing. Be more careful with how you invest your time from now on.
HN is my way of indulging in the present. No plans, no worries, no future. Very relaxing.
It's also a way of tricking myself to write. In high school, I never liked writing much and, consequently, was never much of a writer. Now I like it more; hopefully my writing improves correspondingly. HN is obviously no way to become a writer, but that is not my goal: I just want to be able to write clearly, nothing more, nothing less.
If I was doing something more lasting, I would not want to trust a single entity. This is why all my code on GitHub is also backed up at home with the most important projects also backed up on my school account: losing that would actually be painful. Losing my comment history here? Trivial.
It's sort of interesting to see discussions about technology that has long since moved on.
Indeed, I would embrace that deletion.
Isn't there something better one could be doing?
He obviously built value for a lot of people. In addition I'm sure developed some very portable skills. Helping to curate a site that brings that many people joy? We should all be so lucky.
The idea that the rug could be pulled out is indeed a significant lesson, but it's frankly one that both sides of the coin need to learn. Platform sites that encourage users to invest in and create content for will suffer if that content isn't taken good care of, in the long haul.
Besides: your company? It'll probably fail before having more than a couple thousand customers. This page? It certainly had more people interested than that!
So it's not just a viable hobby, but one at which the author was relatively successful.
Same frame of mind I think, slightly different way of expressing it. :P
Because Facebook doesn't know how to deal with changes to pages. Seriously.
Facebook has unilaterally changed my affiliations on me at least twice. There are probably others that have changed, like things I've 'liked', but two really stand out for me.
First, they decided I didn't actually go to the Canadian college that I'm quite sure I attended. They decided instead that I had gone to a similarly-named university in the United States. I'm not sure what happened to the old page/affiliation, but Facebook couldn't handle it.
Recently, I discovered that one of my former employers had been acquired and changed/lost their Facebook page. Now, Facebook is trying to convince me that I actually worked for a band with a similar name to the former name of the company I had worked for.
In neither case was I informed of the change. Several of my friends are still considered to have gone to the American university. I assume some former co-workers are similarly affiliated with the band, but I haven't gone to the trouble to check.
Unfortunately, the Sherlock Page was not the official BBC fan Page for the show; this caused the Page to be flagged as a violation of our terms and we mistakenly removed instead of migrated the Page. After we found out about the problem, we renamed the Sherlock Page to Fans of Sherlock to comply with our policies and migrated the fans + content. We’re sorry for the trouble caused and we’re constantly iterating on our processes to improve the accuracy of our reporting system.
Thank you for posting this explanation -- I do have a question though, the current "Sherlock" page -- is that an official page?
How long will it take for these changes to appear in Facebook search?
I remember in the very early days of Facebook Pages, as soon as they came out I created "Honda" and "Subaru", both with a substantial number of Likes (they were called fans back then, I think?)
I kept my posts on those pages strictly factual, and really just parroted emails from the two companies and occasionally asked for the audience's opinion.
After about a year both of them were shut down by the respective real car companies, and I tried to email their PR about how if they can be reactivated I could just hand them over, since the fanbase was relatively large at the time, but neither ever responded to me. Oh well.
I don't see how you can draw the conclusion that companies shouldn't produce TV shows (I assume that's what you mean by industrial production of culture).
Edit: They have now emailed him, but I doubt it was the same kind of email he was sent before, since it doesn't mention a company.
Well, ok, that's not fair. We also made fan pages on AOL and Geocities, but we got rid of those after a while since gated Internet couldn't compete in the long run with regular Internet.
I guess now we have Facebook, though, and it's different... though I forget how.
Remind me, why did we make yet another gated mirror of the Internet?
Take that love of the show and build a fansite or better yet something where you don't have to worry about the copyright holder shutting you down.
Still wondering about the other page though... ModernSherlock page no longer shows up in search though.
but at least the content is back: http://i.imgur.com/jil2q.png
This might be the work of FB running some categorization cleanup. Your fan page is now sub-categorized as a Community Page for the Sherlock TV show.
FB doesn't seem to have all popular fan pages sub-categorized. For example, fb.me/fansofapple, isn't shown connected to Apple at all.
yep. nice post.