I have sympathy for these folks. The internet opened up wide worlds of possibilities for one person businesses, especially because of the wide reach.
But when you build on someone's platform, you play by their rules. The first thing I'd do if I had a significant FB following would be to drive folks to my website so that I could begin to own the relationship, rather than FB owning it. Hopefully these stories will circulate and cause current FB entrepreneurs to do the same.
I agree with the sentiment, but have you actually tried doing that?
It's considerably harder than it looks. The Facebook audience won't necessarily convert or translate off-site. They may well not join email lists, add you to an RSS reader, or come back to your site unless prompted by a Facebook post.
It's been my experience that often, audiences that will join a list and audiences that will Like a page are completely different. Some audiences are very hard to own a relationship with on an off-FB basis, but very lucrative ON Facebook.
On a risk/reward basis, it's often going to be a much better call to just keep on going with FB and accept the chance that your business randomly blows up.
None of this is to say that you shouldn't try that, or it'll never work, or it's a bad idea - but the "obvious" approach of "take 'em all off-site ASAP" is harder than it looks.
I all but refuse to sign up or use any site that requires me to create a login at this point. I will absolutely never, ever sign up for another forum. My email every birthday is just filled with hundreds of emails from the various forums of hobbies/interests long since gone from my life.
I'd consider going to a site if it had oauth via Google/FB. It's own login is a hard stop. And even at that point there's probably an 80% chance that I'll forget about that site after a week.
If you're a content creator don't make it my job to find and keep current with your content.
I'm just the opposite. Throwaway logins are easy with a password manager, as are throwaway email addresses with Mailinator. If a site only allows logins via Google/FB, I'll go somewhere else.
I'm also a "content creator," and while I syndicate some stuff to FB, everything I produce is hosted on my own VPS at my own domain. Giving FB/Medium/whatever total control over your work is insane.
But then Facebook/Google are tracking you, monetizing you, and own your log ins. Stop being lazy and just spend more time being picky about what you actually sign up for, or use a temporary email or an alias when you sign up for things. Also, if you're getting a bunch of emails, go unsubscribe from the sites sending you those emails, delete your account, or change the email address on the account to something that doesn't exist.
I was 100% referring to the UX that thenomad mentioned in getting users to move to other services for content ingestion.
> Stop being lazy and just spend more time being picky about what you actually sign up for
Wow. I'll be sure to travel into the past about 20 years and tell 12 year old swozey to not sign up for HondaCivics.com because you'll be out of that phase of your life when you're 17.
You completely missed my point.
I'm not going out of my way to ingest media on private platforms as opposed to ingesting that media on a couple of platforms that are aggregates that I already use.
I'm not signing up for your personal video site when I can watch your videos on Youtube.
I'm not downloading your personal music app to listen to your album when I can play it on Spotify.
If your stuff isn't available on these platforms, or whatever major aggregate relates to your style of content; 99% chance I just won't partake in it.
In the early days of the wide public internet it began with walled gardens like AOL.
They're bad for users, but they're great for the gardener. Looks to me like Facebook is a new way of making a closed ecosystem of posts, accounts, and so on, aiming to grow to encompass shopping and all other functions so you don't need to leave.
Their corporate policy tends to block some of the weirder and more deviant things that make the Internet the Internet. It's a shame.
Do you remember what the alternative was? You be really chaotic nerdy and use Lynx, Usenet, BBS to find what you want? So that you can write it down on a txt file just to remember to check it again later or store it for later?
No one's got time for that.
AOL was the rubber floaties around your arms as you first took a dip into cyberspace. AOL scoured, organized, and packaged the internet into consumable portions and served it up for 50 hours a month.
This walled garden idea only makes sense when what is outside the wall is better than what's inside the wall. And even back then it took awhile before you made the jump from AOL wrapped MSIE to paying for Netscape.
The world always needs malls. That's just how humans socialize. When the deep web gets colonized, it too will inevitably get its own mall. Facebook put together that mall now, it serves as land lord and it polices itself somewhat to the extent of not pissing off its users to the extent of serving its own needs.
That's not a very hard intuitive idea to pick up. Piss off Google, get delisted, and poof, same thing. Piss off Ebay, get banned, and poof, same thing. Piss off Uber, get blacklisted, and poof, same thing. Piss in the community pool and get kicked out.
So here's the big so what: saying screw it and doing it yourself is also really, really hard. Try to match up the vanity facebook numbers yourself on the wild wild web. Explain to the average person how to buy a domain name, setup web hosting, login to FTP, setup a blog, add content, add social sharing plugins, comments plugins, recommendation plugins, then convince millions to pay attention without the benefit of a push-pull network in effect.
That's not even what the writer's intent is with this article. All of that has been stale since the IPO days. We're way past the IPO days--Facebook is a great walled garden. We're also way past the privacy days--privacy is dead.
We're now at the part asking: is Facebook a public utility or not? Does it want to be? Does it want to be treated as such? Does it deserve to be treated as such? Will it then kowtow to serve the public as such?
That's what all these recent #facebook posts are really wagon circling around. Wondering out loud why Zuckerberg doesn't want to run for office as president with the dawning of the realization that as a corporate master, he doesn't have to to be presidential.
PS: The internet at 100MM people was pretty f-ing great. But the internet at 7B scares the living bejesus out of me. But I'm not going to be running to declare make the internet great again. There is no shame in this. Just rational and pragmatic decisions to be made to keep going forward.
When will the clock reset and kids grow up to remember something besides 70's pulp scifi as a reference point to what dystopian future was suppose to be like? Maybe something good will come out next year.
Considering George Orwell's "1984" hit the top of the Amazon bestseller list a little while ago, I think the classics are here to stay.
That said, no one's stopping you from "resetting the clock" yourself. If you were to write some decent dystopian-future novels, I know a few people (including yours truly) who would appreciate it.
Free access to all past media online caused culture to suddenly halt just after the turn of the century, and turn from a directed timeline, where fashion mimicked the advancement of technology, into a weird swirling self-referential ironic vortex of ahistorical relativity.
> You be really chaotic nerdy and use Lynx, Usenet, BBS to find what you want?
Yes, it was great. People actually took the time to learn about the technology and knew how to use it. You didn't get idiots calling the Internet Explorer icon "the internet."
It wasn't great if you were trying to sell to the general public but that's also what made it great for everyone else. It wasn't commercialized and saturated in ads.
This raises the technical cost as well as monetary cost, and the main mechanism we have in our society to reduce these costs is free enterprise, which recreates the the problem of a platform you don't ultimately own.
Free enterprise also has a lag before it can fill the need created by the abuse of the hegemon.
There are other mechanisms, like laws, rules and judgements that derive from custom and gain force of law. It's another tool in civilisation's toolbox and it should be considered.
Right. The only difference between the meme entrepreneur and the small restaurant kicked out by the rising rent is that the former has the novelty of the new. I bet he could go on reddit and start over and sell t-shirts or something and make some money, if he's that good. And I bet he is pursuing alternatives right now.
Building something on the web on your own platform means you own it, control it, and are not beholden to anyone or any company provided you are reasonably within the law.
Building an app for iPhone? You're sharecropping. Android App? Sharecropping. Facebook? YouTube? You guessed it.
My friend Ryan Bates build railscasts.com but has been on hiatus for almost 4 years. Even so, his site still has value, and at any time he can pick it back up again and start rebuilding. If you love freedom, I don't know why you would pour your life, mind, and skill into anything that's sharecropping.
Of course it's better to control your own destiny, beholden to no one. But giving that as advice, without addressing how much harder that has gotten over the past decade, just seems out of touch.
People use Facebook services to make a living because that's increasingly where their customers are now.
Businesses need customers, and customers have migrated to a few platform providers. Telling people to stay away from those platforms is like telling someone to open up a retail store in the middle of nowhere.
Hmmm. The trade-off that might cause one to "share crop" (which is a great analogy) is the reach one can get. It is a lot easier to build an audience on Twitter or Facebook than on the open web, because that is where the people are. Building an app for the iPhone or Android markets? That's where the people are (though fewer folks install apps than in the past).
There's no trade-off. You can use platforms like facebook or twitter to increase your exposure and reach, but make sure the real content is either hosted on or duplicated on a site you control. That way, if one platform decides to kick you off, you're not completely toast.
Unfortunately, that's not an option for iPhone app makers. Those people (and their incomes) are at the mercy of Apple.
I think it is not quite as easy as that. There are also stories of people who got shut down by PayPal. So at some point you'll be dependent on somebody, at least a payment processor - at least until Bitcoin becomes more prevalent...
And what about the search engine - if you fall out of Google's Index, business will also be harder.
There may be ways around it, like opening a physical shop where people can pay you in cash, but these are not automatically the better businesses to build.
Facebook is comparable to opium in the 18-19th century. Dictated by powerful organization, some considered it harmful but most considered it normal, addictive in nature, and people consuming it wastes precious time. In no way I am saying facebook equals opium, just pointing out some aspects of it is potentially dangerous to our generation (So as many other stuff, e.g tobacco, alcohol, etc).
I agree with other commenters that we should post our original content on our own domains. That is what I do and then use social media platforms to point back to my domain.
That said, even with some danger of depending on other peoples platforms, there is a revolution happening that involves platforms that connect creators and users/customers.
I depend on Leanpub and Amazon to publish my eBooks and as a new business I am implementing mobile apps for both Apple's and Google's platforms. In the antifragile sense (from Nassim Taleb's book by that name), even though access to one of these four platforms might go away, access to each being fragile, spreading out over four platforms hopefully makes my business antifragile.
I don't have $50,000 to buy a memorable, pronounceable .com off a squatter.
Like San Francisco real estate, domain names work for the people who were lucky enough to get them while get getting was good. The rest of us are screwed.
99% of the value Facebook provides is a "DNS" for real names which resolves collisions nicely using your social graph (i.e. it knows which John Smith you mean).
> I don't have $50,000 to buy a memorable, pronounceable .com off a squatter.
I don't think domain names are really that valuable anymore. Many companies that purchase domain names do so after they have found revenue etc. (thefacebook.com comes to mind)
> I agree with other commenters that we should post our original content on our own domains. That is what I do and then use social media platforms to point back to my domain.
I don't see how hosting your own domain helps if you depend on Facebook for traffic. The question is: how much would it hurt if FB kicked you off their services, and could you replace that traffic some other way?
I see lots of companies offering competitions where you have to comment on a post and sometimes tag a friend to have a chance to win something. If instead of doing that they required people to signup for their newsletter, then they would use Facebook for farming new subscribers, which is a relationship they own (they probably have to pay for the sending service, but that is like me having to pay for gas: I am not beholden to a monopoly).
> blocked from Facebook after using its messaging tool to share sensitive photos
A few months ago there was a report (that got a won't-fix response from the bounty programme) that images shared privately over messenger are accessible by API if a guessable ID is known.
That's one thing, and obviously conversations are not encrypted, but now the above quote - not only are they insecure, but they're actually being actively snooped on.
I've nothing to hide, etc. - but I'm talking to my friend; not to Facebook - and it's from my own country's police service that I've nothing to hide, not some private-sector company in America.
As a society we are going to have to figure something out: if intellectual property has value, then content contributors are adding value. That means kicking them off is depriving them of the value of their labor.
In the public sphere, we would say they are being deprived of property without due process. In the world of private companies, there is no such protection. For one thing, all the mechanisms we create to ensure due process, ability to appeal, know the charges against you, and seek redress... those cost time, effort, and money.
Platform companies like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube/Google occupy an interesting space. They sometimes act like common carriers and most users implicitly assume the company doesn't meddle or play favorites. False. The companies can and do play favorites (who supplies the highest quality impressions? who has the best conversion rate? who pays back the most in ad dollars?)
Contributors kind of just assume they have some property rights in the things they create. False.
Contributors assume they have some means of redress when an unjust action occurs. False.
The "sharecropping" analogy is apt, but even sharecroppers had better contracts than content creators today have!
Historically, whole systems of government have been tried and replaced to work out fair and just (or at least acceptably unjust) systems. The European revolutions of the 1850's were largely about land use conflicts. Part of the French Revolution was about the conflict between renters and landowners.
Yes, after two behind the scenes Facebook contacts at that. Seems like Facebook would benefit by putting a better process in place, though of course we don't hear about the reinstatements where everything went swimmingly.
To be picky (as I am) all that NPR obtained (reportedly) was that:
"Facebook is now in the process of contacting Nyaira directly about her account. "
(no actual evidence that the account was re-instated, and seemingly the "now" is presumably some time after the good NPR guys were coincidentally at Facebook and were assured an "ad personam" intervention would happen )
E2E encrypted chats aren't by default. But they did achieve what they planned - you thought they were because you saw it mentioned sometime somewhere, but didn't look into the fine details. When reading headlines, a person might memorize "facebook encrypted chats available", but the devil is always in the details.
The sibling comment is correct that e2e encrypted messages are not the default, but they likely weren't available at all in this case. They started rolling it out in July 2016[0], but that case started in June 2016.
This is imagining humans to be useful in a way I wouldn't expect. You have a guy who posted a lot of paid ads despite warnings, and a woman who genuinely did post child pornography. Do we really imagine that reaching a human would have somehow changed the outcome?
They definitely did violate the rules, so I imagine the call center employee would just confirm it, tell them as much, and hang up.
In the second case, at the very least there were rational, honest reasons for her doing so, and a human being is at least capable of discerning context and making a judgement call, even if it's just to kick the issue up the chain to someone who has the authority to rule on the issue.
Sure, it's possible for a human to make such a judgement call, but most of the time call center staff are going to be working from a script and trying to get done with your call as fast as possible.
There's not going to be a path on their script for "was indeed child porn, but it seems okay", except perhaps for account theft.
The problem I see is that they are promising a review process that is clearly fake. No human ever looked at these cases just like no human ever looks at any cases that aren't called out by friends at the company or high profile news reports.
At the very least that's simple fraud, but more troubling, they put forth their appeal process as a reason to trust them when clearly we should not.
A little Googling suggests people have gotten things appealed, so it's more likely that humans are taking a look, but they're just not producing the outcome you want.
But when you build on someone's platform, you play by their rules. The first thing I'd do if I had a significant FB following would be to drive folks to my website so that I could begin to own the relationship, rather than FB owning it. Hopefully these stories will circulate and cause current FB entrepreneurs to do the same.