Live data from Hacker News

What I Learned When Facebook Disabled My Account (2012)

optimizationtoday.com

111–120 of 133 posts

Re: What I Learned When Facebook Disabled My Account (2012)

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'If you are not paying for the product, then you are the product' This adage is beginning to show its age - virtually all services that can get their hands on your data end up selling it nowadays, whether you pay them or not. I heard even some restaurant chains sell data on who they served and when.

Indeed. It's time to simply say: in surveillance capitalism, you are the product.

Mm, no. The user is not the product. The user is labor. Our labor is to collect information about Facebook's customers' customers.

Re: What I Learned When Facebook Disabled My Account (2012)

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'If you are not paying for the product, then you are the product' This adage is beginning to show its age - virtually all services that can get their hands on your data end up selling it nowadays, whether you pay them or not. I heard even some restaurant chains sell data on who they served and when.

We need laws that will put real chill in the people who try to get away with something like this.

How do you mean? Laws that prevent services from targeting ads and content based on their users' identities?

Re: What I Learned When Facebook Disabled My Account (2012)

#113
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The employees aren't paid to be "nice" // Why not? Our UK micro-business's (PLC's) internal motto is "be nice" seems to work well.

How many billions is your UK micro business worth?

Lol, yes, of course if it makes lots of money then it doesn't need to be run morally or with any degree of humanity. /s

Re: What I Learned When Facebook Disabled My Account (2012)

#114
post #71
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The actual solution would be something like "pool all our money, then execute a hostile takeover of Facebook, kick the entire board, and pivot the company to a nonprofit business model". Until then, well... https://xkcd.com/743/

I don't fully understand the point this comic is trying to make. Can someone give me their perspective please?

It says you gave up your ownership (and the control that goes with it) for convenience, and now the new owners are doing things you don't like with what used to be yours.

Re: What I Learned When Facebook Disabled My Account (2012)

#115
post #109

Every person I've known to have their FB account deleted also happened to be people who posted inflammatory, toxic content on a daily basis. most of them also acted that way in PMs with people, but on an even more terrible level. Harassment level conversations, and probably a much larger scope than I was directly aware of. I am not at all convinced that Facebook just deletes accounts for no reason. Sure, high-profile…

Facebook is such a mega-center of cultural life, that for it to have a black-box method of permanently banning people is dangerous, however you may feel about the "attitudes" of the people who're ostracized. Maybe I am inflating their role.

It's not a black box method. Their Community Standards[1] are pretty cut and dry, and every person I've known to have been banned was flagrantly disregarding those standards for months prior to their accounts being deactivated.

[1] https://www.facebook.com/communitystandards

Re: What I Learned When Facebook Disabled My Account (2012)

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're there, and have been for years. The employees aren't paid to be "nice", and if you don't have a contract with the company storing your data, then you're making a mistake relying on them. Rely on them for convenient access to your files...but not as your prime copy, or your essential backup. You use their services at their whim.

>The employees aren't paid to be "nice" // Why not? Our UK micro-business's (PLC's) internal motto is "be nice" seems to work well.

It doesn't mesh well with the corporate amorality that large organizations seem to tend toward in pursuit of profit.

> Lol, yes, of course if it makes lots of money then it doesn't need to be run morally or with any degree of humanity. /s

Why did you add the sarcasm tag? The proof's in the pudding: When Facebook throws people off their platform, the first, second, and third reactions of the victims seem to be trying to climb back on. Apparently, they don't "need" to be run morally.

Re: What I Learned When Facebook Disabled My Account (2012)

#117
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes the only way to win is not to play at all. If you want to contact me on Facebook about that... well, I never had an account, and I am surviving... somehow. BTW https://mastodon.social is making some headway. I see a lot of security people have switched to it.

Isn't that a twitter clone? (My point is that IMO twitter was the most useless of all the mainstream social networks until snapchat arrived. I reached this conclusion by seing that you can get to twitter functionality from both facebook, instagram and google+ just by removing features and introducing limitations.)

When Twitter was launched Facebook didn't have a news feed and Google+ was non existent.

Re: What I Learned When Facebook Disabled My Account (2012)

#118
post #42

I think the worst thing that they do is disable your ability to send messages. This weekend a friend committed suicide, and I had just started a seven day ban due to idiotically posting the wrong photo (a nude) to a meme group. Whereas most of my closest friends have me on WhatsApp, so I could reassure them I was ok, it was really fucking horrible getting a bunch of Messenger messages asking if I was ok and being com…

> there appears to be absolutely no form of appeals process It's a common problem with these giants (Facebook, Google, Twitter). Being an area that does not generate profit there is not attention paid to it, or just the bare minimum. Though I understand the difficulties to scale something like that to hundred of millions of users. Even if a small fraction want to appeal whatever ban they received that could be quite…

> Being an area that does not generate profit there is not attention paid to it, or just the bare minimum.

I don't buy that. Amazon Associates/Google adwords/etc have a long history of silently banning people who are actively generating revenue for them with no recourse.

Re: What I Learned When Facebook Disabled My Account (2012)

#119
post #94
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, I find it interesting that everytime somebody is complaining about censorship on Facebook, they are almost always following up with complaints of some other objectionable content not being censored. The think about the nipple ban is it is a really simple rule and it is really easy to decide if a picture contains a nipple or not.

I suspect Zuckerberg had a traumatic breast feeding experience as a teenager, and decided if he can't do it anymore, nobody can.

Please don't do this here.

Re: What I Learned When Facebook Disabled My Account (2012)

#120
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes the only way to win is not to play at all. If you want to contact me on Facebook about that... well, I never had an account, and I am surviving... somehow. BTW https://mastodon.social is making some headway. I see a lot of security people have switched to it.

Isn't that a twitter clone? (My point is that IMO twitter was the most useless of all the mainstream social networks until snapchat arrived. I reached this conclusion by seing that you can get to twitter functionality from both facebook, instagram and google+ just by removing features and introducing limitations.)

> My point is that IMO twitter was the most useless of all the mainstream social networks

I Twitter is the most honest social network. Everything is public, the end. Unlike Facebook's "privacy" settings.

Post reply on HN