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Comment by malloreon | Hacker News Reader

This seems like a good place to ask:

Why do people "become a fan" of a brand on fb? What value do people get from publicly declaring they like gatorade? I contrast this with the implicit declaration that occurs when I carry a gatorade bottle around, because in that situation presumably I'm enjoying drinking it.

I cannot see how doing so would benefit a) me or b) my friends who might see that I like gatorade.

It just seems like I'm a) giving fb more information about me and b) inviting gatorade to try and sell me things.

Am I wrong or is becoming a fan of a brand just all bad for the user and all good for fb/the brand?

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I can think of several reasons:

1) discounts / promotions / contests and other forms of bribery

2) upcoming products you want to hear about as soon as they're ready

3) products you genuinely love and want your friends to know about

4) companies you support for ideological reasons (they support some charity/cause you like)

5) social signaling / status (mark yourself as an Apple customer, or a Coach bag owner, or whatever.)

6) the brand puts out genuinely entertaining advertising (some people really like the Old Spice "smell like a man" commercials)

People who wouldn't declare themselves "fans" of Gatorade might still be OK declaring themselves "fans" of The Glenrothes Distillery, or of The Butcher and Larder in Chicago, or of Merge Records. Doritos doesn't have much social signaling value, but the St. Louis Cardinals do.

Also: 99.9% of people who use Facebook don't think at all about how much information they're giving Facebook. They don't care. So Facebook knows I like Bob's Burgers but not The Family Guy. And?

>>> So Facebook knows I like Bob's Burgers but not The Family Guy. And?

This. While in general privacy is definitely a concern, I see "don't give your information" way too often and it's becoming sort of a cliche.

How might the fact that I like some certain artists affect me in the future? No one is going to blackmail me for the fact that I liked Wu Tang Clan. I won't get denied some visa or whatever because I liked Donnie Darko movie.

Privacy is important but let's stop from making it a cliche or some 'easy win'.

"This is an ecological problem, because our individual choices worsen the condition of the group as a whole. The service companies' interest, but not ours, is to hide this view of the problem, and concentrate on getting individual consent. From a legal perspective, the essence of transacting is consent. If privacy is transactional, your consent to surveillance is all the commercial spy needs. But if privacy is correctly understood, consent is usually irrelevant, and focusing on it is fundamentally inappropriate.

We do not, with respect to clean air and clean water, set the limits of tolerable pollution by consent. We have socially established standard of cleanliness, which everybody has to meet.

Environmental law is not law about consent. But with respect to privacy we have been allowed to fool ourselves.

What is actually a subject of environmental regulation has been sold to us as a mere matter of bilateral bargaining. The facts show this is completely untrue" -- Eben Moglen

Perhaps a good rule of thumb: if, fashion sense aside, you'd wear the t-shirt, it's probably not a privacy threat.

There's a huge difference between wearing a t-shirt, which makes the information available only to people who see you wearing that t-shirt, and becoming a fan of a brand on Facebook, which makes the information available to who knows what Facebook affiliate.

In one scenario, you have full control over when you signal that information and when you stop. In the other, once you send out the signal... congratulations, you're now in several databases and have opened yourself to all sorts of soliciting.

You can easily stop wearing a shirt when you change your mind about the topic.

Once it has been on the internet, it is forever.

Not saying you're wrong, but I don't think it is exactly the same.

Maybe tattoos?

> Once it has been on the internet, it is forever.

If that were truly the case, we wouldn't be so worried about NSA retention of data.

My phone conversations aren't supposed to be "on the internet."

This is probably something worth saying louder.

If you commonly display $information in all sorts of settings, then $information is not ipso facto private and leaking that information further is not a privacy threat.

(Of course, it can be used as an input to deanonymize you in some data-mining system, so there's that...).

>How might the fact that I like some certain artists affect me in the future?

Constellations of consumer interests might be enough to create a high likelihood that you're gay, a drug user, sympathize with anti-tax protesters, or with anti-globalization protests. The next algorithm to be run over your profile might benefit greatly from this initial filtering, and depending on the distinctness of the constellation, may not result in very many false negatives.

The second algorithm auto-authorizes full text email and full audio telephone collection and review. </dystopia>

Agreed. Both ability to read materials anonymously and to discuss things privately are very important for both freedom and democracy.

That does not mean we must treat every single personal preference as top secret material.

> How might the fact that I like some certain artists affect me in the future?

What if the FBI decides to categorize your band fandom as a form of gang affiliation?

http://edition.cnn.com/2014/01/08/showbiz/juggalo-gang-lawsu...

Some people may not like it when companies deny them services or charge a higher rate because people who share the same interest are riskier or are willing to pay more.

Our historical data indicates that people who like Bob's Burger but not the Family Guy have a higher probability to default on a loan (PD).

But can't you do that with anything? Browser statistics, which page they spend most of their time on? What colors they use in their profile picture? What stuff their friends like? Sentiment analysis of their status updates? How many likes per page view they post?

I feel like this could very much be a case of http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikaandersen/2012/03/23/true-fa...

http://tylervigen.com/view_correlation?id=1597

US spending on science, space, and technology has a 0.992 correlation with suicides by hanging, strangulation and suffocation

None of those things could tell you if the human torch was denied a bank loan or something. You're better off just grabbing their bank records.

Why should Family Guy viewers be required to pay higher loan rates?

Public interest is probably best served by making sure that lending markets are healthy enough that making meaningless distinctions based on silly data is not a viable practice (rather than fretting over exactly what data is allowed to be considered).

>>> So Facebook knows I like Bob's Burgers but not The Family Guy.

I see how they would know that you like Bob's Burgers, but how would they know that you dislike The Family Guy? Or, were you saying that they know you haven't declared you like Family Guy at this point in time? I ask is cause I was missing a way they could track the former, and also because I think Facebook is missing the boat by not having a way to dislike something.

If I were looking to by Brand A and saw a lot of my negative sentiment for that brand Brand B would need less positive sentiment for me to be sawed to it. In that scenario they start to displace services like Yelp.

Facebook needs to learn the things I hate, because whenever I get IKEA ads I post a bunch of stuff a out how they don't pay their tax.

I really want all ad platforms to give me the choice to opt out from some advertisers -- especially from alcohol and gambling.

I assume an EXTREMELY high number of these 'likes' are due to these companies offering freebies/prizes that you have a 'like' and comment on their page in order to participate.

"Likes" are like currency that is virtually free of cost, and I think the younger crowd has no problem giving away likes. They don't have the stigma / fear of spam, data mining, etc. that the HN crowd does.

Please even the HN/Technology crowds don't have a fear of spam, data mining etc.

Gmail, Google Search, Twitter, Facebook etc are all widely used.

For everyone, it comes down to convenience

Its a pity that one of Facebook's main revenue source is promoting brand's posts, because otherwise it would seem like the best decision they could make is to outright ban any posts along the lines of "Like and share and comment on this to win a prize", both to reduce the noise on people's timelines, and to improve the quality of the like data they're collecting on users.

There's a similar effect on Twitter with brands asking for retweets, but I see less of those, presumably because the kind of people I follow on Twitter are less likely to get sucked into that.

I could be wrong, but I'm fairly sure some years ago FB had a rule that you weren't allowed to force people to like your page to enter a competition. Last time I had to set up a competition for a client (a couple of years ago) that rule didn't seem to exist so either the rule has changed, or I dreamed it.

Either way I'm glad I have nothing to do with that sort of work anymore. Having quite a few friends in agencies I see the X likes Y posts all the time because they have to like a load of brands for their jobs. What a miserable waste of time.

They can do better - they just don't show you them, unless the page pays to promote it.

I'm a homebrewer and lover of craft beer. I follow a lot of local breweries and beer brands that I like? Why? Because I want to hear more from them. They are a part of my life, just like my friends, so they should be included in my feed.

I also follow Fox Soccer and ESPN FC because it's easier to have content pushed specific to my interests rather than go to espn.com and click on the soccer tab.

I follow businesses as my business because I want to build a profile. I also follow competitors and peers because I want to stay in the loop.

It's just a large RSS feed really.

Except, with an RSS feed, you can be assured that you are receiving ALL of the content that is being published by the site you are following. With Facebook, you are at the mercy of a black-box algorithm that decides which posts you want to see. Those local breweries are going to have to pay FB in order for all of their followers to view any specific post.

But I don't want to receive ALL the content. Unfortunately social media "consultants" and "experts" have decided to conflate spamminess with user engagement, and many businesses I legitimately want to hear from have taken to broadcasting every minutiae of what they do.

The black-boxiness of the algorithm is non-ideal, but some algorithm is required.

What FB has done is force people to game the system in order to appear in the feed, which results in more content than people are able to consume, which results in the fact that we don't want to see it all because some of it is junk.

This is a problem that Facebook has created, and one they will wrestle with until they either fix it and save their business, or are displaced by an upstart.

You can tell Facebook to deliver all the content from a particular brand or person. There is a setting.

Well, people don't see the world as you do. They don't/can't see they are giving more information to Facebook by liking a brand.

They do it because it's a way to socialize.

Also when you like a page, you will be following it. That is, you will see news from that brand's page on your news feed.

I don't "like" any major brands or companies on Facebook, but I do several local companies. The froyo place we like publishes their daily flavor offerings on Facebook. The local butcher gives coupons on their Facebook page. Stuff like that.

Facebook is constantly recommending to me things I should like. I ignore them all. I drink a Diet Coke from time to time, but I don't need the latest Diet Coke news.

Certain brand are worth following for the content they publish. Gopro's pictures/videos of the day are almost all stunning and one might want to follow them the same way you would subscribe to the RSS feed of The Atlantic's In Focus or Boston.com's The Big picture.

I personally follow a few kiteboarding brands that publish great pictures that I enjoy having in my feed.

I'm not sure about gatorade, but with some brands it can be a show of support in the company's mission/values/etc. It could also be a smaller company that you just want to make the existence of known to your social network because you think their product will better everyone's lives.

>> It just seems like I'm a) giving fb more information about me and b) inviting gatorade to try and sell me things. Am I wrong or is becoming a fan of a brand just all bad for the user and all good for fb/the brand?

This assumes that giving Facebook information to deliver ads for things you actually want is a bad thing, a position I disagree with. No matter how hard I try, I will be advertised to. I'd prefer to get ads for things I might actually want than a return to the lowest common denominator ads of the past (which tend to be things like diploma mills, insurance, or payday loans).

I fb-like brands, specifically to show my friends which brands I like, similar to how I liked specific movies, books, and music.

A few brands that I have very high affinity towards: Crumpler, Nike, and Canon.

Your friends don't care what brands you like! I promise you.

I think it is possible for someone to desire their friends to know a thing about them even while knowing that their friends don't actually care about that detail.

Maybe a subtle unconscious change about how one is thought of might possibly be a result? (I don't know, but I don't think I can rule it out as a possibility that could be desirable to some.)

Oh, you know my friends?

Awesome.

Hey we're going to grab coffee next friday, you should come along!

Depending on the brand some people like to see updates from them. Of course this isn't true for all brands and like batiudrami said people get tired of how often many brands post updates.

Ultimately AS a marketer, I'd agree that the point is to sell you something when you like my brand. It's inherently self-serving, but that doesn't mean that a brand can't bring you joy and satisfaction through their interactions with you online.

IE I like GoPro on Facebook. Ultimately they want me to buy a $400 camera and all the accessories, but they also inspire me with images and photos to get me outdoors enjoying things I also love.

So...complicated thoughts are complicated.

Some people just like the free dopamine hit from clicking on stuff.

Is it not so you can get updates on new product ranges and coupon codes, if I ever like a Facebook page its so I can get coupon codes. Nothing else.

But using the Gatorade example, if I already like gattorade, presumably I buy it already so I don't need incentives. It is almost like finding out who doesn't like Gatorade so tthey can be targettted.

It's way easier to sell stuff to people who already like it. You just need to convince them to buy more often and larger volume. (2L coke bottles, 2+1 deals). You can do this by creating occasions for people to consume your product and combining products.

The idea is that they'd RETAIN you as a customer through giveaways and/or coupons. Also, there's the possibility of word-of-mouth advertisement from happy customers (eg "I won a free case of Gatorade! I love that company!")

People don't see becoming a "fan" as a declaration of love for Gatorade. They see it as a way to win tickets or something similar.

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