Zynga: forget games, let’s just do viruses
flirtatiouslabs.com
flirtatiouslabs.com
If Facebook doesn't police a major partner from abusing its API like this, they are effectively condoing this behavior and inviting their other app partners to do the same.
I can't believe that Facebook has become another MySpace. Its product/market fit was so strong just a few years ago that they seemed unbeatable: a true anti-MySpace. Since then, it seems like in their pursuit for growth they've basically completely gutted their product/market fit and worked to destroy the trust they'd built up with their users.
Pruning overgrowth from companies like Zynga & co is my number one request as a facebook user.
Its a lot like email. The email address that only my friends have, I watch all day. The email address every asshole I've done business with in the past 5 years has I check about once a week. (Everyone important has my phone number.)
Don't like updates from a specific game or app? You can turn off all updates from that source.
Don't like updates from your uncle grandpa joe but can't deal with the social fallout of unfriending him? You can change your subscription to only see "important updates", or you can unsubscribe from a user altogether.
Friended or subscribing to someone cool and don't see enough of their updates by default? You can specifically subscribe to see all of their posts rather than just the ones Facebook thinks you'll like.
There's even more options than that available to you, just click on a post and choose Hide, and you'll get multiple options for what you can do with that. Use it liberally if your friends list is full of people who post things you don't want to see. The power is in your hands.
I can either block every photo or none, but there's no "block Justin Bieber and Zayn Malik photos" filter.
Edit: that said, I find Facebook extremely useful for keeping in touch with my family, which is spread all over the world (from here in Uruguay to the U.S. to Europe to the United Arab Emirates).
They probably should do; but it's a tough decision to make now that they are answerable to shareholders.
I can. I know many social app development groups (outsourced in India) who worked on MySpace and are now working on Facebook - though they say the real money is moving to iOS, Android and Windows8 app dev.
While it obviously needs to be remedied for the benefit of user-experience FB also has shareholders who want to continue to see positive revenue gains.
TLDR: FB made about 10% of its 2011 revenue, $4270 M, from Facebook Credits, $470 M.
Their projected 2012 revenue is $5042 M, of which $811 M is expected to come from 'Facebook Payments and other revenue'.
This doesn't say how much of that revenue comes from Zynga specifically, though
Sources:
http://venturebeat.com/2011/09/20/facebook-revenue-2011/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2012/08/30/poof-1-bill...
In addition, these "OK/Yes", "OK/(auto enabled toggle)", "YES-only" dialogs are not unique to Zynga and not unique to Farmville 2; it's been around for a while. I suppose the author of the blog was only recently compelled to try out the game?
The post is on the blog of a social gaming company; their key take-away seems to be:
Developers beware the backlash with yet less discovery for quality gamesBut there is no technical reason why Facebook doesn't allow users to categorically block a virus developer. It's a political reason: new viruses entering the system get new eyeballs, reinforcing the business model.
I doubt they're complaining on behalf of smart technical people... instead, it's all their friends who fill news feeds with junk because they don't know any better!
Those checkboxes look exactly like what they came through after testing dozens or hundreds of different combinations, optimizing for acceptance rather than honesty.
[1]http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2006/11/01/92244...
I also guess that tactics like these will erode user trust over time.
But most users are neither savvy nor concerned with things like this, in my experience. They may be annoyed with it, but the majority of people simply don't apply any meta-analysis to the sites they use, as we so often do here on HN.
I'd guess that they use these techniques because they are successful. So that's an interesting dilemma -- how can a (public) company decide which ethical path to take? If they don't use these techniques, they are doing their bottom line a disservice. If they do use them, they are crossing into a grey area of ethics.
What are companies (startups, especially) supposed to decide, between a slightly grey area success or an ethical failure?
PS - I know that's a bit of a false dichotomy, but making it a black-and-white issue simplifies it for discussion.
In the hope you see this, I have another question for you: in the startup world, what recourse is there against unethical competition? Some companies like Uber (esp. in Boston, NYC), are able to fight the good fight. Others, like Padmapper, are trying to do so.
But for the majority of companies, legal recourse (especially looking for legislative redress rather than establishing case law) is not an option. What should an ethical startup do when faced with acting unethically (yet similar to established competiton) or not existing?
Again, thank you for putting the price->ethics perspective so elegantly.
I think the best weapon you have is mudslinging. Start a blog and explain how and why this works and why it's wrong. Try to get it read by the unethical practitioner's customers: they're your targets. Hopefully, you can have an effect and force-feed ethics into the price mechanism... but honestly, I don't think you'll get very far or see much of an ROI.
That's my best guess, and I'm not terribly happy with it.
Its compounded by the fact that I'm trying to launch a game called Flirtatious, that is attempting to make meeting someone online fun, as non-creepy and not too fake either (check it out here apps.facebook.com/flirtati - feedback will be read and thought through).
Launching a game as an indie dev is difficult to start with, and even more so when the ecosystem is being kicked in the face by the big boys on a regular basis.
But there's plenty of blame to go around for this stuff being out there. Zynga for doing it, Facebook for allowing it, and the user for not reading about what they're clicking.
Same thing with advertises and their little asterisks in the bottom with unreadable letters. It's just a shame that this is pretty much the only business model that you see today in "social" games.
Never understood what is social about sharing a predefined message that you have harvested a crop.
Nothing. This is a misunderstanding of the history of the term. A "social game" is a game built on top of a social network site (authoritatively defined here: http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html ) that makes actual usage of the SNS mechanisms. Farmville was the genre-definer (social games fitting the definition pre-Zynga were not categorized as such), so it's not surprising that the term is basically bullshit.
Wikipedia has an article that differs a bit from my explanation here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_network_game
If moving forward required clicking an okay with no other obvious out, then I would agree. But in this case they had two chances; the first with a not-so obvious opt-out while the second had the obvious opt-out.
It seems like apps like these are basically destroying "open graph" fabric that FB wants to put in place. Its a great concept in general, but I do not see any legitimate use of "auto publishing" functionality for any app. If there is, potential abuse far bigger than any gain from the legitimate use. Although this puts Open graph with its actions and auto sharing etc in jeopardy.
Sure, the flow isn't as transparent as it could be, but the title is clearly linkbait by piling on Zynga.
There are tons of applications on Facebook that post stories without the user's realizing, and calling all of them viruses too would meet the metrics of the author but would be inaccurate.
Zynga 'games' are viruses that exploit security vulnerabilities in the human mind. The extension of usage is just as defensible as the original extension to digital computers.
What a bunch of fluff
Not necessarily. You may lose someone immediately who would've eventually given in and opted-in after the 50th dialog.
Your argument is that is, Facebook has an interest in providing inoculation against viruses to their users, while the viruses themselves (Zynga) have a vested interest in removing possible inoculating effects within their ecosystem. i.e. Facebook should provide inoculation against Zynga. Now, your argument revolves around the "active/positive" end of this, where you make an appeal to Facebook to reduce the most egregious examples of this[2], as it will increase user pleasure, enhance the ecosystem and provide you with healthy users. To be fair, this approach has produced some movement from Facebook on the more obvious ones (such as the early phone ads).
This is all well and good ~ however, you're ignoring the "negative/passive" way in which this is done.
Zynga actively creates an ecosystem that ensures that the most successful viruses (i.e. <b>your social game</b>) have to conform to the most successful strategies, precisely because it is so metric / psychologically driven. If you want to compete against a dominant virus, aping the same Skinner-driven models (http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/11/28/1931246/more-on-why-...) makes sense, both in market terms and ecological terms.
But you're aiming at the wrong target. Facebook isn't purely a host, it's also a virus. In fact, it benefits from a relationship where it isn't the "worst" virus, as this makes it more attractive to users (i.e. changing security / functionality / sharing of user data being the more obvious examples), while the ecological impact Zynga provides allows it to act more aggressively as a virus (i.e. your user base becomes used to virus tactics). The relationship is mutalistic, as the market well knows.
Your real target needs to be inoculating the user, so that they either recognise the strategies of the viruses and produce anti-bodies against them (the "Steam model", where your user will only react favourably to positive behaviour by a virus, because they react violently against negative behaviour, forging a symbiotic relationship[3]) <i>or</i> by producing a product that is more suited to your environment. i.e. is better at virus intrusion than Zynga, either in camouflage ("we're-nice-but-secretly-screwing-you") or by creating antibodies against other viruses ("I get such an empathetic bond with this virus, I'm not sure why, it just makes me feel good"). (The distinction is purely in the awareness / active interest of the user).
Wall of text: right gripe, wrong target. Facebook and Zynga both know their core market, and the real question is: why don't most users have such antibodies against viruses automatically?
Answer: probably due to culture & this being the first true generation of users experiencing such viruses. Of course, without being too cruel, there's some that will never produce antibodies, as we all know. http://www.bogost.com/blog/cow_clicker_1.shtml
[1] Never virii, never. [2]Which, as we all know, <b>was/is</b> Zynga, especially in the more outspoken criticisms at certain Cons.(http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20091108/1122426850.shtml - please note, I might well be making a joke from where I'm getting my sources from), [3] In a purely user<>host example here, there's problems with Steam just as any other DRM / software provider [4] This example broke down in the first instance by not treating Zynga as a producer of viruses, and multiple other problems due to me typing quickly and not wanting to turn this into ecology 101. I hope that it was at least a little bit interesting / useful.
If I had time / inclination, we'd re-work the OP's example into Facebook and Steam etc being protozoa, Zynga would be some bacteria living inside Facebook with our users as the host and introduce all kinds of biology comparisons. Zynga-as-Virus as an analogy wouldn't be too useful as it's not a case of simple self-replication in attacks / predation on the host; it's also camouflaging itself as other fauna to fool the hosts' current anti-body set, as EA, a much larger protozoa, is trying to eat it for as competition. There's also the fact Zynga would have to live inside Facebook in a mutalistic relationship, while they both feed off each others' intakes from the host.
Would be fun, modelling it all.
Now I urn for the Spore-that-never-was, damn, but we wouldn't want to scare the hosts when they realised the real lions, tigers & bears out there, I suppose.
And regardless of where it came from, "okay" is certainly a word now, at least in the sense that it's widely used and in dictionaries.
The page itself says there is no consensus as to the origin of the word, and links to another page[2] with a list of possible origins. 'Oll Korrect' seems like it's the definition with widest acceptance, but it's not the only contender.
I've seen 'Okay' used on other websites, though none come immediately to mind, and have never given a second thought to Facebook's spelling of the word.
Even if 'oll korrect' was the origin of the word, 'okay' is still perfectly acceptable to me. It would hardly be the first English word to make such a transition.
http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/OK: "OK (also okay)"