I think this rant is out of place. He was just acting like a spammer, was warned about it but continued just because in his mind sending a lot of friends requests to unknown people was "nice". That does not mean that it is nice for others as well.
Complaining he had no right to appeal and comparing Facebook to a nation, or dictatorship (or even the nazis just for a deleted account on a free service) is out of place in my opinion. Facebook is not a nation at all nor it has to behave like one, it is a business, with rules you agree on signing.
Funnily enough I've been struck with a block on a "page" from Facebook; the page is for a nearby City.
My crime appears to have been removing spam posts that were advertising affiliate links and pyramid schemes and the likes.
Obviously I've just been blocked from full access with no questions to me and no way for me to enquire if I'll ever get any of that access back or indeed if they plan on someone else taking an editorial view of the page. The page meanwhile is going to the dogs filling with more and more spam.
Obviously my actions weren't nice for some people either - spammers need to spam to make money and I was obviously preventing that.
So, I think my point is it cuts both ways and that Facebook appear to be rather haphazardly managing their monsterlith.
And the thing that really bugs me about all this is that having written this disingenuous article, he's just managed to get a platform to market his book to the thousands of people who are currently reading this article in order to complain about what a tool this guy is.
There's even a handy Amazon link from within the article!
I think the guy is a bit of an idiot, but lets not gloss over the fact that there was no appeal process ... Even Paypal, who are regularly demonized on the internet, have one.
No, the users of Facebook are not FB's customers. Their customers are the people who pay them, groups like market researchers, advertisers and Zynga . The users of FB are its product, not its customers, and all of the features FB adds and maintains to its site and applications are product development.
This is a popular idea on HN. You're only a customer if you pay. But, it's an oversimplification. A better definition of a customer is a user who's presence increases your profits.
One way customers increase firm profits is by paying. But, in two-sided markets customers increase profits apart from what they actually pay. An example of two-sided market is a dating site. You could charge men and women. But, if you charge women more, fewer will join, and the site becomes less valuable to men. The optimal solution may be to charge women nothing so you can charge men more. But, you're kidding yourself if you think that only men are your customers. The men are paying in cash, but the women are also paying by increasing the sites value. Indeed, it is likely that one non-paying woman is worth more than one subscribing man.
Facebook users are also customers. They're paying Facebook with a lot of valuable data and eyeballs.
To further the original analogy, you can think of FB users or non-paying dating site users as "inventory". It sounds a bit dehumanizing, but it doesn't have to be: in traditional business you have to manage and maintain your inventory properly as well. E.g., frozen food has to be kept frozen, planes have to be serviced regularly, etc. Maintaining your inventory has a cost, but you need to bear it because that's part of what you're selling. When running a site like FB, you have acquisition costs for your inventory (things you do to get your users to sign up for your site) and maintenance costs for your inventory (things you do to keep your users using your site).
So making sure your users happy is an important part of your business because otherwise you're mismanaging your inventory. But you're free to decide that some of your inventory is too expensive to maintain vs. the value you and your customers derive from it, and it doesn't make sense to carry it anymore.
"This is a popular idea on HN. You're only a customer if you pay."
It's also a popular idea in the wider world of business, which predates FB by several thousand years. If you are interested in an abstract theory of wealth, that's great. But the rest of the world transacts in money, which is brought in as revenue and paid out as expenses. At the risk of oversimplifying, when you subtract the latter from the former and the number is greater than 0, then you can make a claim of profitability. Users donating data and attention might be good for your business model and help increase profits indirectly. But they are fundamentally different from customers who pay money (a means of transferring wealth) to use your product or service (a form of wealth).
Counter-example: Barnes and Noble does not consider users who visit their stores to read books and magazines without paying for them as customers. They provide B&N with incredibly valuable data (e.g. which books and magazines people want to read) and eyeballs, but they aren't customers. And neither are Facebook users.
Semantics aside, whether or not FB users are "customers," FB obviously needs them in order to be in business. Without them, it gets 0 dollars.
So the original point, "you have no right to complain because you don't pay to use it," is silly. Whether or not users have a RIGHT to complain, FB should prefer responding to their complaints over losing them as users.
As it happens, it seems that most FB users aren't phased by anything FB does in terms of privacy or heavy-handed policies. So unless those complaints get loud enough to signal that users are about to start leaving en masse, FB doesn't need to care.
In general, I agree the statement "you have no right to complain because you don't pay to use it" is silly. In the context of "a user violates the terms of usage, is repeatedly reminded of them, continues to violate them, is banned, and then complains about it", it's not. The guy was spamming people to sell a book. It's a special case, not a general rule.
I get your point. You need actual dollars coming in to be profitable. But, my point is that in some markets a lot of people not paying is worth more than a few people paying.
Whether I pay you, or make your product more valuable so other people will pay you is irrelevant. Whether you call me a customer or not is irrelevant. You should treat me well if you want to stay in business.
I don't see how the B&N example fits. Browsers aren't making the bookstore more valuable to people who actually pay. Plus they take up seats. Get rid of browsers and B&N makes more money. Get rid of Facebook users and there is no Facebook.
That's exactly right. The users make the profits possible. If it wasn't for those "leachers" using the service for free, Facebook would be entirely worthless as a financial venture.
So the guy was spamming everyone with friend requests? Even more, he got warned by the system that he was spamming and he continued along?
I tend to be anti FB, but I do agree that it's annoying to get so many invites from marketeers. Maybe the age difference explains this difference in attitude, but for me it's actually clear =/
Yeah - he's the sort of thing on facebook that makes me hate facebook. That he can't even see that spamming people is wrong is what's astonishing about this article.
But it does really highlight perfectly the way facebook acts as the purest crossover between marketing and socialisng. Disturbing to say the least.
He also, I think, doesn't understand spam. He comes from a world where paper scarcity offsets the desire of marketers to send out advertisements. The idea that marketing is so easy that it needs to be regulated and avoided unless your targets initiate it is completely alien to him.
Bullshit, he thought he was using the service the correct way.
Anyway, he should get a twitter account instead. Twitter's about talking, Facebook is about harvesting your personal data and relationships for better marketing.
Clearly he doesn't understand what the purpose of facebook is, or internet netiquette for that matter. I always felt that Facebook is in an eternal september, I guess this just supports that notion.
If he had been directed to create a Fan page instead of a regular user account, he would have been OK. Maybe Facebook needs to be more proactive in diverting new users who are promoting themselves or their works to the appropriate type of account.
There is something to be said for this. The guy is clearly totally clueless about what this whole "Intertubes Thing" is and probably the Facebook rep could have examined the case, seen that, and directed him as such. But his reaction is still pretty ridiculous.
He is oblivious to the concepts of nettiquette, spam and social networking, but, given his age it's understandable.
I recently helped my father (also in his 50's) join Facebook, and I wouldn't be surprised if he goes on a friending spree. He already has a history of sending "free" greeting cards to anyone whose email address he has. In fact, reading this made me aware of the need to make sure he isn't inadvertently abusing Facebook.
Geez, this has nothing to do with his age and everything to do with his level of web experience. Your comment is pretty close to saying "giving his race" or "given his country of origin".
I believe ern's comment was right on the mark. We have to remember that older people - bring their own set of affordances to the table. They're used to thinking about things in a pre-computer world, and have to get used to the models of thinking (unnatural models, I must add) computers force upon us.
I looked at the wording after I posted the comment, and wondered if it would offend anyone.
It wasn't meant as an ageist statement, but I think it's a safe bet that the majority of older people (hackers aside) are late adopters. His own son told him "If you're on Facebook, it's over."
It would be interesting to see demographics of FB users. I would bet recent trends shift toward more older users and fewer younger users. If their user base is shifting that way, then it's over for the 18-24 age group, but the boomers will create new behavior/usage models that FB would be well to exploit. That age group has more money and is about to have more leisure time as they retire. Advertisers couldn't wire money to FB accounts fast enough to target that market. Think BoomerBook.
I believe ern's comment was right on the mark. We have to remember that the elderly bring their own set of affordances to the table. They're used to thinking about things in a pre-computer world, and have to get used to the models of thinking (unnatural models, I must add) computers force upon us.
But even Hitler's sham courts gave defendants a chance to reply to the charges. Facebook justice more resembles the Taliban's.
says the US american "military expert". Fact is, the Sharia allows the accused to defend himself. I am not saying that I think the Sharia is good, but linked article contains gusting fear-mongering.
Your account was disabled because your behavior on the site was identified as harassing or threatening to other people on Facebook. Prohibited behavior includes, but is not limited to:
Soliciting others for dating or business purposes
Richard's standard reply: "I write about military aviation and I'm the author of a new book on the V-22 Osprey. I like to use Facebook to connect with people who have similar interests and spread the word about my book. I hope you'll check it out on my Facebook Wall.
At the end of the day, shouldn't we be blaming his daughter?
If his article is any indication of what reading his book is like, I'll be staying far faway from it. Leave it to a writer to write 50 pages in what could have been boiled down to one. This seems to be another example of his generation gap, his not understanding that an Internet audience is not so willing to give their precious time to read a wordy and way over long article.
I quite don't see what he's complaining about. Maybe he should've properly learned about all the features of Facebook that help promoting commercial products (Fan Pages, FB Ads)..
It's interesting to see the reactions people have to perceived facebook spam. When the YC startup I intern at launched a new product, we invited our facebook friends to check out the fruit of our labor.
The two responses I got from friends were "What the fuck is this astroturfing bullshit? Has your account been hacked or are you really just this much of an asshole? ", and "cool! I'll check this out.", by another friend.
Where do you draw the line? Personally I'd say that friending people you don't know definitely crosses the line. For some, clearly the line is drawn at sending anything remotely business related.
This is really about a clash of culture. As an author he's probably quite accustomed to promoting his books to the widest possible readership by whatever means are available, but it also appears that he has little familiarity with the ways of the internet.
Did I carefully read the Facebook ten commandments before joining? No, I didn't. To a large extent my behaviour on Facebook is a product of my previous experiences of internet etiquette. If you have no previous knowledge of these semi-explicit rules it would be quite easy to commit a faux pas.
Questionable behavior aside there is immense irony in that, by writing this rant, and, given the incredibly popular title and subject matter of the article, he will undoubtedly receive even more publicity and attention for his book than he did before.
When I discovered this, my reporter's instinct kicked in.
Success as a reporter often depends more on who you know than what you know. Networking is a core skill. Networking is also Facebook's advertised purpose, so that's how I started using it.
Success as a reporter also means recognizing a good story when you see one. Not to say conclusively that he did it on purpose, but what better story to draw publicity to yourself (and, your prized book)?
I get some friend requests from people I don't know. It's no biggie... I just let the request sit there unanswered. I suppose maybe they were authors and I should consider sending them a message, but I really only want a certain type of person on my FB, namely work and school friends. Not family, and not strangers. Anyway, there's no way I'd consider the author's behaviour "abusive," I mean get a grip. A level of faux-sensitivity seems to come into play with internet users.
Just so you know, not rejecting them is allowing them to follow you on their news feed. It will only show them public data, but it will be published to them instead of them having to seek it out.
to everyone who called him a spammer: I think there's a big difference between a botnet brainlessly shooting out thousands of copies "Your sperm will become self-conscious and start carving - with SpermaMAX" and trying to target people who actually might want to buy the book.
This seems closer to the guy who used AI-magic to find people who'd tweeted about books and to tweet other recommendations to them. Both of them tried to pick people who seemed like they might be remotely interested.
I think it depends on whether your definition of how spammy something is has to do with relevance or permission. I tend to think that permission has a lot more to do with it.
If I sign up for a mailing list, I've given them permission to contact me. Even if they never send me something I care about, it's not spam (assuming that the email sent is related to what the list purported to be about).
If I have a personal friend who, as an inside joke, likes to send me links to penis enlargement sites, that's not spam, although if it's too common, he might find himself filtered out or not my friend any more.
If someone I have no other connection with decides to contact me with a commercial offer, that's spam. I haven't given them permission to send me that sort of thing. Even if the offer is relevant to me, it's still spam.
Signing up for Facebook pretty clearly gives people who you know to contact you with friend requests. It doesn't give random people trying to sell something that permission, so their doing so is spammy.
why is it that people believe that they have a right to use services provided by another entity? What happened to having a right to refuse to do business with others?
Wow, who cares? So he spammed and got some notice of deletion? Whoa! I mean, the only entertaining thing about this article is the "Share on Facebook" badge the top. Mr. Big Atlantic Intellectual doesn't see the fallacy of comparing a private companie's decision about how to handle its own definition of abuse with how the laws of the U.S. work with respect to criminal matters? And Nazis? Really?
Just in-case anyone have not seen the system come into use on Facebook. It's like an automated waring system(prolly is fully automatic). First it warns about adding so may people so quickly, it only kicks i if you're adding what appears to be complete strangers. So if you're adding a lot of people and they are mostly a friends-of-existing-friends type of deal or they have something i common like they are in the same school/year/grade network then it not as aggressive. Upon each(yes there are multiple if you keep it up) warning, it states clearly what will happen if you adding people that quickly. IIRC it even says the reason for the warning is that you're adding people too quickly and you should slow down. The next stage is to stop you adding people for a short while, it tells you about this and that you could be banned if you it up. If you stop adding people for say a day or two you slowly regain your ability to add people, if you're well behaved for a while you can start adding strangers again, but for many you will be notified that you can't add them because the system doesn't think you actually know them.
To sum up, if you get banned for adding too many friends too quickly regardless of whether or not you were spamming, i.e adding real friends then you're an idiot. Also, throwing a bitch-fit about how you left before you could get banned is silly, all it does is draw attention to you for being one of the people that are ruining Facebook for people who use it. For the record, I log on to Facebook approximately 15 minutes every couple months on average but I still find it annoying when people add you when the have no intention of being your friend.
Complaining he had no right to appeal and comparing Facebook to a nation, or dictatorship (or even the nazis just for a deleted account on a free service) is out of place in my opinion. Facebook is not a nation at all nor it has to behave like one, it is a business, with rules you agree on signing.