Slashdot Mirror
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.
As a company providing APIs and encouraging development on your platform is great as long as you maintain control. The problem with APIs is apps can, provided the APIs provide enough of the right data, totally remove your influence in favor of the developer using your APIs. I first saw this Social Fixer app a few weeks back and I immediately thought "finally, someone that will remind us who owns facebook: the users." Facebook will have no revenue if they cannot monetize the marketing of their site, and with free APIs they can't do that. Paid APIs? Devs want free access, so you'll kill your dev community if you start charging.
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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.
News at 11.
(On a more serious note, the same thing happened to the extension FB Purity.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
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.
He writes an application that runs on top of your browser when it's looking at facebook. why not throw in some code to re-imagine his fan page the way it was before? This could serve as the start of a way to wean users from facebook altogether, give them a little real content mixed with more open data (like a social media aggregator) and eventually replace the entire facebook experience with an aggregated one that can share/source on any platform. that way, when one provider does something silly (or vengeful, whatever) the app just routes around it.
Maybe Kruse was a B.U. student and it's Schmuckerberg's thinly veiled attempt at railing against a university who is now #41 in the country. Go Terriers!
If Facebook violated a contract then they have grounds for legal action. Otherwise, to quote Airplace "They bought their tickets, they knew what they were getting into. I say 'let'em crash'". caveat emptor
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!
I have a sneaking suspicion that in a month or so facebook is going to release a "premium" interface, which will be disturbingly similar to Social Fixer.
Like every updated forcing me to "like" his page automatically, so I have to unlike it on every update. That's kind of scummy for his greasemonkey script to auto like pages.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
Gone from the easily accessible ... sure. Deleted? No way.
Facebook doesn't delete anything. Ever.
They can put it back anytime they want.
$10 says that once enough people bitch, we'll here some BS excuse about an accident or bug and it suddenly re-appear.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Didn't Slashdot just link to an article on Ars how he was almost recruited by Facebook and how he steered clear of certain areas of customization?
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/08/25/2053214/meet-the-programmer-behind-social-fixer
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.
Did you look at anything in the links? At all?
Social Fixer does not have a business model of "telling people not to trust" Facebook. It's an addon/extension that lets you tweak UI elements of Facebook. Your whole comment is irrelevant.
The entire story is irrelevant.
Summary: Guy makes extension which alters FB page rendering, which is a violation of their TOS. He gets ignored while makers of other extensions which do similar things get shut down. FB finally shuts him down, tells him why. Dipshit Slashdot poster creates article with bullshit headline and summary which lacks details, Dice quickly promotes to front page to generate clicks.
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.
Who could have seen this as the outcome of standing in the crosshairs of corporate power while flipping the double deuce?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
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).
Facebook got rid of a page on Facebook which describes Social Fixer and provided a link to the distribution point, and support for SF. The actual distribution point, located off of Facebook's servers, still exists, and Social Fixer STILL WORKS. (The same can be said for the other, "banned" extension, Facebook Purity.)
When you (Facebook) design your product (Facebook) to run as a javascript app within a user's browser, you have ALREADY GIVEN UP total control of your site.
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
What a farce. Facebook makes it's money off spam, hence the reason if you report something as spam or offensive it will STILL pop up on your newsfeed.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
They have battered women now? I've just been eating them raw.
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.
I know this is way off topic, but does anyone know of a similar plugin for Gmail? One that maybe rolls back some of the stupider 'improvements' they've made to their interface?
Specifically, something that will axe the awkward and idiotized new 'compose' and 'reply' interfaces, rolling them back a version? Oh, and restoring a one-click logout option would be sweet, too :) I understand why they hid the logout button way back when, since they definitely have a vested interest in people not logging out...ever...but it's just one more annoyance in the pot.
Oh, and while we're talking UI modifications, I wouldn't say no to the ability to sort by columns in the webclient, something that Froogle has never offered...I'm just sayin' :) Oh yeah, and being able to see the size of emails (especially ones with attachments, obviously) would be a sweet bonus.
I know, I know, I can get all this in an offline client, but the three things I do like about Gmail is 1) it's portability, 2) tags instead of folders, and 3) conversation view. The conversation view could be replicated in an offline client, but I haven't yet found one that supports tags instead of folders, and of course any offline client is by definition not portable unless you carry it around on a thumb drive with you...then just hope you have a USB port available on the right platform to plug it into...
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
When Facebook did this very same thing to the author of Fluff Busting Purity, the author of Social Fixer pooh-poohed him for violating Facebook's ToS. This here is Karma coming home to roost. And it's about time. Equitability must be maintained.
Think of me when you shave your legs...
That he didn't take the job offer they gave him. They wanted him to work for them and he opted to stay where he was at with the job he was happy with and not uproot his family. At the end of the day FB is a business and they are going to do whatever they want or need to to keep the revenue stream growing. http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/08/meet-matt-kruse-the-man-making-facebook-better/
None of the cool kids use facebook anyway.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I've never even known anyone that lost anything by refusing to use facebook (or other social networks).
Well, you wouldn't, would you? That's the peril of abstaining from a communications technology.
I miss out on stuff all the time because I refuse to use social media; sometimes my friends remember to tell me individually, and sometimes they forget. I don't really have any right to demand that they make extra special care to communicate to me when their preferred means of communication gets the rest of us; it's me that's the odd one sticking out. It's nice when they think of me and let me know, but it's not some great social snub that they don't walk across the room to speak to the guy standing alone in the corner. I'm the one who opted into that.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Facebook wants to make money of its spam, not your spam.
'It's gone. Years of work and almost 340,000 fans, wiped out. Erased.'
He should really have made backups if his work is so valuable to him. Cloud storage might be in these days, but putting all eggs into the same basket is risky either way.
I wouldn't have heard of this extension if FB hadn't done something to annoy this guy. I installed it this morning and tried it out. I like it. It does give me options Facebook doesn't offer and that I didn't even know I was missing. It probably won't be for everybody. Their overlay is well done, but is slightly different from FB's styles. That's probably a good thing. I'll be more likely to know where problems are coming from if I have any.
It's not all that different from using Greasemonkey scripts to fix sites, just with Facebook APIs thrown into the mix.
I like the way you think! Now if only we could come up with a way to share photos, videos, and talk digitally ...
. /sarcasm Nah, that would never work.
This is capitalism.
If you're not a customer, you're a commodity or an expense. Stop being surprised when you get treated like one.
I bet you lost money with Zynga's IPO too...
As somebody familiar with both Matt Kruse and Social Fixer over the last several years, allow me to clarify just what the real issue is here.
What makes this frustrating is that the Social Fixer page, and the suspensions of the personal accounts of Matt, his wife, and all of the page administrators, is that none of them had any means of communication with anybody from Facebook about it. There ONLY option was to click an "Appeal" button. They couldn't ask exactly what they did wrong, they couldn't ask how they could make things better. It was an entirely unilateral decision made by somebody within Facebook that completely blocks the communication that social media is supposed to help foster.
Matt is not clueless about how Facebook operates. After all, at one time, somebody within Facebook was actually recruiting him. What is even more bewildering is that this could happen in spite of the fact that SOMEBODY ELSE within Facebook knows of the work Matt does and found him to be favorable enough to even offer a job. So, now Matt is only left to wonder, did this removal of his community page happen because Facebook is cold and mechanical, or did this happen because somebody within Facebook has an axe to grind with him personally?
To me it's not astonishing that this happened, it's astonishing as to HOW it could happen.
Use the HTML interface plus the Better Gmail FF extension..
https://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=html&zy=h
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
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 far as I can tell, FB doesn't listen to what the users want or like, it just follows along with it's own plans for us, and when we complain, it just whistles louder to itself.
He did. He stated what happened, and the only statement FB has given, he refuted. Everything else is opinion due to a lack of information and dialog. FB decided to take his ball and go home, and won't answer the door or the phone. Not a lot of options left there pal, so him and his buddies are trying to gather together on the nearby sidewalk and get someones attention. Metaphorically speaking of course.
In the age of the NSA, the AC may be safer/smarter than the non-AC.
Seriously, I had no idea this software existed until I saw this article. I'm going to download it right now since I think Facebook's UI is an eyesore. Whatever FB was trying to accomplish is guaranteed to backfire spectacularly.
Microsoft either abandons or "dead-ends" languages and platforms with gay abandon. Google drops popular and useful things like google reader because it just didn't monetize quickly enough for some bean counter. Facebook follows in their footsteps by doing the same thing.
We developers are less than fleas to large corporations. Your only defense is to hitch your star to open source languages and platforms. Microsoft, Facebook, Google, and their ilk simply don't give a shit about their development communities. At all.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Use a smtp/imap/pop client. Eliminates all that sort of crap. Also you can tie in other accounts so that your yahoo & hotmail incoming get aggregated together, should you find that desirable. The only interface you'll see is the clients UI, no bogus enhancements from the mail provider or ads either. And I have to agree, I took a look at the gmail web interface, and it's the worst. Plus, half of it won't even work with my preferred browser, it's useless.
who cares?
the content of his message was a productive addition to the discussion that's all that matters
that's the point of anonymity
I wouldn't bother posting this, except that your ridiculous kind of bullshit posturing and insistence on privacy-invading log-in's are the same *bullshit* that underlies this move by facebook.com to get rid of Social Fixer.
Social Fixer was a threat to facebook.com's business model simple as that. It's written into their IPO in the section that describes threats to company revenue. They say that legislation or other rules or policies that give users control over their data is a threat to their revenue.
Sure we all know that's how they work, but don't you see how having it in a **legally binding contract** creates a certainty of a type of behavior that none of them can now control?
due to their IPO it is a **mathmatical certainty** that facebook.com INC will do this as a matter of Standard Operating Procedure.
Every 'Social Fixer' in the world should expect this.
as to parent, you need to completely reverse your understanding of anonymity and human interaction
Thank you Dave Raggett
Facebook will one day be myspace and that is a fact. If your going to build something put it on your own server. And point to open water www.nextcoolthingxxxxxxxx.com
You agree to be owned by FB when you sue their services. You agree that everything you plug-into it is theirs to do with pretty much as they see fit.
If you don't like that, and only a fool would, stop using it. Just stop. Do you really need the internet heroin of the "like" button and pictures of kittens and ugly and banal memes to fill-up your days anyway ?
The only reason FB exists is because they've made so it easy for you to become addicted. You made the choice to get addicted to it. Stop crying about it and free yourself.
Nobody can free you but yourself. Not the government, not FB, not corporate America, not your religion, not your friends, not the political party you've aligned yourself to, none of these entities care about you or your freedom; they all seek to monetize you.
You're doing it to yourselves.
Facebook deserves to be defunded, but as I have little faith in the wisdom of markets and investors, surly to annoy Libertarians and other rabid Captalists, maybe even that most obvious sociopath, Marrk Zuckerberg himself, the stock price is as high as it has ever been, stupid idiots, so much for Milton Freeman who never deserved a Nobel Prize, and economics does not deserve to be a Nobel Prize catigory. But I digress!
The irony of all is that the blue on glaring white default style was inpsired by Zuck's own COLOR BLINDNESS according to a NetTuts+ discussion of the UI. and Social Fixer was an attenpt to fix defficiencies in the default style. It made FB accessable for me, a low vision user who could use a big colored font on a dark background. It still doesn't go far enough in using the screen real estate in an efficient and responsive way. I would like to see someone take the UI away from Facebook's engineers, do this locally on the browser with a CSS reset and use of a local DOM parser like jQuery, and thumb its nose at Face Book engineering by hiding the right pane of the grid, the challenge is to hack the javascript from Face Book on your browser and either thwarting FB control or providing an allowed secondary app to post from. Fact is, that if ONE disabled Federal worker has to use FB in his work and struggles with the limitations of FB's UI, FB can be sued to provide accmmmodation under the ADA, and for that they should embrace Social Fixer, not screw with it.
Facebook needs to be taken down for its arrogance. What I hope, against hope, is that investors wise up and take their money out of the corporation and cause it to fail. At that point the decent parts of the social media experiment can be reconstituted by unbundling the CMS fron the UI and the global friends list. The three parts could be separate business entities and the model Facebook users, a Big Data control for the benefit of its business partners at the expense of the user experience can end. As it happens I leve a couple of miles from FB's HQ, in fact worked in those buildings when it was Sun Microsystems, but that is only incidental, as I think that a bit of code running on my browser can fix the mess and screw FB's business model. It is time to hack FB, and with their help, because their SDK is the keys to the kingdom and if one can build an app outside the browser that does something they support for mobile use. It can be used against them and punish them for not being kind to their users.
Facebook is a business. Facebook is not a "right". You choose to subscribe. They may be dominant, but they are not a monopoly. It's a free market. If you don't like what Facebook did go somewhere else. The number of "Friends" someone has on Facebook is inversely proportional to how much I want to be one of them (this last is a personal opinion, you don't get to argue about it). Social media is a government plot to get you to give away information they can't legally take (ok, now I'm trolling).