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Facebook Deletes Social Fixer Community Page Without Explanation
New submitter ComradeF writes "Matt Kruse, author of the Social Fixer for Facebook browser extension, warns users of the dangers of building a community on a platform that can and will shut you down on a whim: 'It's gone. Years of work and almost 340,000 fans, wiped out. Erased. I have never been given any details about what "community standards" I was apparently violating (because I wasn't). This is a case of Facebook choosing to shut down someone's business just because they want to, not because they were doing anything wrong. This is extremely frustrating and disappointing to me, and should be to others as well.' The administrators and moderators of his Page found that their personal Facebook accounts have been silenced for 12 hours, as well." I've recently installed Social Fixer, and find it tremendously useful; this news just inspired me to donate a few bucks to Kruse — cheaper than what Mark Zuckerberg would like to hear my complaint.
It lets mere users control what they see on their own Facebook pages, rather than Facebook and advertisers determining it.
What was he thinking?
To throw a few lawyers and systems administrators and delete the problem than it is to hire a few good interaction designers to fix it and deny the folks in marketing their 10 pieces of mandatory Facebook flair.
That's EXACTLY what you get when you don't own the server on which your "site" is based. Regardless of the user agreement, TOS, or whatever, this will happen on any such site. You were immensely naive to have not realised this to begin.
:(
captcha: unkindly
Sorry, but some times, the truth hurts.
Anyone that has no control over what their business requires is going to fail sooner or later. If it was a genuine business, Kruse should have a contract in place with Facebook, like every other entity that needs Facebook's APIs and data for their own business.
Stop giving up your life to big business, and they'll stop being able to tear you a new one.
This isn't like that other article, where the British government is selling off a natural monopoly so you're forced to use a particular business. This is you thinking that you are entitled to get Zuckerberg to do anything more than widen the smile on his deservedly smug face.
Facebook got rid of something that took away their control over how the users interacted with FB's pages. Is that surprising? FB wants direct interaction and monitoring of its cattle so that it can package up their information to sell to the highest bidder. Why would they tolerate anything that threatens that by giving users better control over their use of the site. It might hide some useful information that they are gathering by the inefficient design they have created.
Facebook: always remember you are the product, not the customer. The customers are Big Business (and now the NSA apparently) :P
This is why every single user should delete their FB account.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
Quite remarkable idea for a Firefox extension. I have to try it immediately!
Ah, the class and critical thinking of slashdot on display, yet again.
I detest these, "I'm not sayin', just sayin'" kinds of comments online.
Let's try something new:
If you're accusing the people involved of pulling a scam like the one you describe, then come right out and say it, and provide your evidence.
If you can't/won't do that, then STFU.
I'm not entirely taken with Nicholas Carr; but he has a useful little coinage to cover this situation: "Digital sharecropper".
It beats real sharecropping (sometimes you get air conditioning, and even paid in real money rather than scrip and debt peonage!); but if your business (or your hobby, though businesses tend to be more financially painful) depends on a third party, with which you have absolutely no leverage other than their power and mere pleasure, (and where your business consists largely of making their business incrementally more successful), you are a sharecropper. And, while the timing of the crackdown is sometimes rather baffling, since it doesn't even seem to be to the landlord's advantage, it is closer to being an inevitability than a mere possibility.
This doesn't mean that you have to do everything 100% alone in order to not be a sharecropper, commodities are safe enough, as are companies so mired in the demands of actually-powerful customers that they will have difficultly cutting the feet out from under you at a greater than glacial pace; but a situation where you are 100% dependent on a single third party who has the right, and the ability, to cut you down just by revoking an API key or deleting a page on their own servers? They own you.
Isn't one of the things Social Fixer is doing is trying to prevent Facebook et al from tracking you?
So, if you have a community page on Facebook detailing how to block some of Facebook's functionality ... then maybe you chose the wrong platform to do this one?
Facebook doesn't owe you your business, but superficially (and possibly incorrectly) it seems like Facebook might be annoyed you're using their system to bypass/alter some of the elements of Facebook.
Facebook can't say a damned thing if you host this elsewhere -- but isn't this is kind of like expecting Microsoft to host articles detailing how to pirate Microsoft products?
Welcome to the world of Terms of Service and EULAs, where the people who own the service can and will make any changes they want and you don't get a vote.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
In this specific case, if you are telling people to distrust Facebook, with a Facebook group, you'll get a lot of blog posts and Twitting if you shut down the Facebook group with no warning.
To be blunt, you have to wonder if people like this are more a part of the problem than the solution they purport to be.
The real- and obvious- fundamental problem is how Facebook operates their site. This company's product merely papers over the symptoms with a "solution" that doesn't address the real issue, and will only *ever* be short term, breakable at a whim by Facebook themselves. But by making Facebook more palatable over the short term, they hide this problem and encourage people to stay with the site.
It's a waste of effort that might annoy Facebook but ultimately plays into their hands. Fundamentally, if it doesn't encourage Facebook to change their behaviour and/or policies *or* work on moving people away to another service- or whatever- then it's still a part of the Facebook ecosystem and encouraging its use (and hence supporting its cynical behaviour and discouraging other, more responsible approaches to social networking).
Of course, it might suit *them* from a business point-of-view to be doing this anyway, but for everyone else it's not so great.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
The Social Network Website Cycle:
1. New social network site (SNS) starts, targeting a very small group of individuals. It's small, it's clean, it's easy to use, it helps people stay in touch with their friends, so a significant percentage of that target group joins up.
2. SNS targets a bunch of other similar groups, and the site starts growing.
3. SNS targets progressively wider groups until it's now millions of users.
4. Now, it opens itself to the public.
5. Once the user base is sufficiently large, it sells out, either via an IPO or a private sale.
6. The people who just bought it try to "monetize" those users by selling them advertising, related apps, etc.
7. Eventually, the users start getting fed up because the ads are too intrusive, the related apps are expensive and not useful or fun, and of course the SNS is taking people's personal information for their own use.
8. A new SNS starts with some small target audience to rectify the bloated annoyance of the dominant SNS, and the cycle begins again.
We've been through this a couple of times, already, and Facebook is somewhere around step 7. They'd like to stay in stages 6-7 for as long as possible.
I am officially gone from
The users don't own Facebook. The users are the product that Facebook sells to advertisers.
We, or a lot of us, are reasonably weary of the government overreach into our personal lives. There are checks and balances in place that over long run designed to keep government from intruding too much into our lives. We could never reduce it to zero, it is necessary evil, but we can and should pragmatically minimize it.
There is no such measures for private corporations, like Facebook, that if happen to monopolize social interaction can become worse dictators than any government. Just imagine how 'freedom of speech' would work, if speaking was not natural but instead enabled by Speech Inc that could stop selling it you on a whim? This is why Internet Neutrality is so important, but we dropped the ball on Social Neutrality and will have to fight an uphill battle.
I think way forward is to deem some services 'essential'. Yes, I shudder at the idea of declaring Facebook essential (I chose not to use it) but for many people it is.
This really tells it in a nutshell.
This extension doesn't "interfere with or impair" the USER at all -- in fact, it does what the user wants.
Now we know for whose benefit that nonsense is written (like we didn't before, but meh...)
That's the same lame-ass argument those serving ads whine over -- you shouldn't have control over how to present the page or block parts of it which is total bullocks.
When I look at content -- I want it tailored for me -- so I can quickly separate the noise from the signal.
If some company wants to cry that somebody is making their content MORE valuable by providing OPTIONS for how people view then they are being extremely short-sighted and not understanding the value the community brings.
Blizzard learnt this by _allowing_ custom UI mods in World of Warcraft. Years later the best mods have become built into the game. /sarcasm Oh noes! "Someone is altering our page rendering" Quick, sue the browser makers!!
making their content MORE valuable
If your website makes money by selling ads, anything that removes those ads has not made your content more valuable. It has in fact made that content worth nothing to the provider.
Maybe it seems more valuable to you ... but as has been said time and time before, with any free service, you are not the customer. You are the product.
"95% of all Slashdot
The answer's simple: Facebook wants their interface to be gobbledygook because that means you're spending more time on the site, and having to mentally filter relevant content from the ads they want you to see. By the logic of someone creating an attractive nuisance, interfering with this kind of product makes a perverse sense because it's making the product better for users but worse for Facebook's actual customers - advertisers and marketers.
I'm betting that he pissed someone off because he's making FB better and giving users what they want better than FB can.
As in so many cases dealing with a free or subsidized service, remember that users != customers, and it will become clear why user complaints aren't really important to the company.
This lesson can be generalized.
-- "Oh. This guy again."